Evaluating and Aligning CodeLLMs on Human Preference
Authors: name: Jian Yang; name: Jiaxi Yang; name: Ke Jin; name: Yibo Miao; name: Lei Zhang; name: Liqun Yang; name: Zeyu Cui; name: Yichang Zhang; name: Binyuan Hui; name: Junyang Lin
Published: 2024-12-06 17:40:38

Abstract: Code large language models (codeLLMs) have made significant strides in code
generation. Most previous code-related benchmarks, which consist of various
programming exercises along with the corresponding test cases, are used as a
common measure to evaluate the performance and capabilities of code LLMs.
However, the current code LLMs focus on synthesizing the correct code snippet,
ignoring the alignment with human preferences, where the query should be
sampled from the practical application scenarios and the model-generated
responses should satisfy the human preference. To bridge the gap between the
model-generated response and human preference, we present a rigorous
human-curated benchmark CodeArena to emulate the complexity and diversity of
real-world coding tasks, where 397 high-quality samples spanning 40 categories
and 44 programming languages, carefully curated from user queries. Further, we
propose a diverse synthetic instruction corpus SynCode-Instruct (nearly 20B
tokens) by scaling instructions from the website to verify the effectiveness of
the large-scale synthetic instruction fine-tuning, where Qwen2.5-SynCoder
totally trained on synthetic instruction data can achieve top-tier performance
of open-source code LLMs. The results find performance differences between
execution-based benchmarks and CodeArena. Our systematic experiments of
CodeArena on 40+ LLMs reveal a notable performance gap between open SOTA code
LLMs (e.g. Qwen2.5-Coder) and proprietary LLMs (e.g., OpenAI o1), underscoring
the importance of the human preference
alignment.\url{https://codearenaeval.github.io/ }