Diff-XYZ: A Benchmark for Evaluating Diff Understanding
Authors: name: Evgeniy Glukhov; name: Michele Conti; name: Egor Bogomolov; name: Yaroslav Golubev; name: Alexander Bezzubov
Published: 2025-10-14 13:23:01

Abstract: Reliable handling of code diffs is central to agents that edit and refactor
repositories at scale. We introduce Diff-XYZ, a compact benchmark for code-diff
understanding with three supervised tasks: apply (old code + diff
rightarrow new code), anti-apply (new code - diff rightarrow old code),
and diff generation (new code - old code rightarrow diff). Instances in
the benchmark are triples langle old code, new code,
diff rangle drawn from real commits in CommitPackFT, paired with
automatic metrics and a clear evaluation protocol. We use the benchmark to do a
focused empirical study of the unified diff format and run a cross-format
comparison of different diff representations. Our findings reveal that
different formats should be used depending on the use case and model size. For
example, representing diffs in search-replace format is good for larger models
in the diff generation scenario, yet not suited well for diff analysis and
smaller models. The Diff-XYZ benchmark is a reusable foundation for assessing
and improving diff handling in LLMs that can aid future development of diff
formats and models editing code. The dataset is published on HuggingFace Hub:
https://huggingface.co/datasets/JetBrains-Research/diff-xyz.