Completion by Comprehension: Guiding Code Generation with Multi-Granularity Understanding

As code completion task from function-level to repository-level, leveraging contextual information from large-scale codebases becomes a core challenge. However, existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods typically treat code as plain natural language, relying primarily on shallow semantic matching while overlooking structural semantics and code-specific dependencies. This limits their ability to capture control flow and underlying intent, ultimately constraining the quality of generated code. Therefore, we propose CoCo, a novel framework that enables code Completion by Comprehension of multi-granularity context from large-scale code repositories. CoCo employs static code analysis to extract structured context at the function, file, and project levels, capturing execution logic and semantic dependencies. It then adopts an graph-based multi-granularity context selection mechanism to filter out redundant information and remove noise. Consequently, the information is converted into natural language in a consistent manner, thereby functioning as explicit contextual prompts to guide subsequent code completion. Additionally, a structure-aware code re-ranker mechanism ensures alignment at both semantic and structural levels. Extensive experiments on CrossCodeEval and RepoEval benchmarks demonstrate that CoCo consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to 20.2% gains in EM. Moreover, the framework is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated into existing methods, leading to significant performance.

Xinkui Zhao, Rongkai Liu, Yifan Zhang, Chen Zhi, Lufei Zhang, Guanjie Cheng, Yueshen Xu, Shuiguang Deng, Jianwei Yin · 2025