{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/humanity-s-last-code-exam-can-advanced-llms","title":"Humanity's Last Code Exam: Can Advanced LLMs Conquer Human's Hardest Code Competition?","arxiv_id":"2506.12713","date":"2025-06-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Xiangyang Li","Xiaopeng Li","Kuicai Dong","Quanhu Zhang","Rongju Ruan","Xinyi Dai","Xiaoshuang Liu","Shengchun Xu","Yasheng Wang","Ruiming Tang"],"abstract":"Code generation is a core capability of large language models (LLMs), yet mainstream benchmarks (e.g., APPs and LiveCodeBench) contain questions with medium-level difficulty and pose no challenge to advanced LLMs. To better reflected the advanced reasoning and code generation ability, We introduce Humanity's Last Code Exam (HLCE), comprising 235 most challenging problems from the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC World Finals) and the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) spanning 2010 - 2024. As part of HLCE, we design a harmonized online-offline sandbox that guarantees fully reproducible evaluation. Through our comprehensive evaluation, we observe that even the strongest reasoning LLMs: o4-mini(high) and Gemini-2.5 Pro, achieve pass@1 rates of only 15.9% and 11.4%, respectively. Meanwhile, we propose a novel \"self-recognition\" task to measure LLMs' awareness of their own capabilities. Results indicate that LLMs' self-recognition abilities are not proportionally correlated with their code generation performance. Finally, our empirical validation of test-time scaling laws reveals that current advanced LLMs have substantial room for improvement on complex programming tasks. We expect HLCE to become a milestone challenge for code generation and to catalyze advances in high-performance reasoning and human-AI collaborative programming. Our code and dataset are also public available(https://github.com/Humanity-s-Last-Code-Exam/HLCE).","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12713v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12713v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"humanity-s-last-code-exam-can-advanced-llms","repo_url":"https://github.com/humanity-s-last-code-exam/hlce","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"code-generation","task_name":"Code Generation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2506.12713","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2506.12713"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/humanity-s-last-code-exam/hlce","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"summary":{"ran_honours":1},"by_repo_kind":{},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"3a7c7ec16769928a","entry":"pass_at_k","repo":null,"repo_kind":null,"path":null,"file_url":null,"link_basis":"identical_code_first_harvested_elsewhere","language":"python","status":"ran_honours","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"HONOURS","metamorphic_tier":"well_formed","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":null,"inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"3a7c7ec16769928a"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}