Papers › NaturalCodeBench: Examining Coding Performance Mismatch on HumanEval and Natural User Prompts

NaturalCodeBench: Examining Coding Performance Mismatch on HumanEval and Natural User Prompts

7 May 2024arXiv:2405.04520archive 2025-07-28

Shudan Zhang, Hanlin Zhao, Xiao Liu, Qinkai Zheng, Zehan Qi, Xiaotao Gu, Xiaohan Zhang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang

Large language models (LLMs) have manifested strong ability to generate codes for productive activities. However, current benchmarks for code synthesis, such as HumanEval, MBPP, and DS-1000, are predominantly oriented towards introductory tasks on algorithm and data science, insufficiently satisfying challenging requirements prevalent in real-world coding. To fill this gap, we propose NaturalCodeBench (NCB), a challenging code benchmark designed to mirror the complexity and variety of scenarios in real coding tasks. NCB comprises 402 high-quality problems in Python and Java, meticulously selected from natural user queries from online coding services, covering 6 different domains. Noting the extraordinary difficulty in creating testing cases for real-world queries, we also introduce a semi-automated pipeline to enhance the efficiency of test case construction. Comparing with manual solutions, it achieves an efficiency increase of more than 4 times. Our systematic experiments on 39 LLMs find that performance gaps on NCB between models with close HumanEval scores could still be significant, indicating a lack of focus on practical code synthesis scenarios or over-specified optimization on HumanEval. On the other hand, even the best-performing GPT-4 is still far from satisfying on NCB. The evaluation toolkit and development set are available at https://github.com/THUDM/NaturalCodeBench.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

thudm/naturalcodebench mentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

HumanEval

1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

NaturalCodeBench

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutFocusGPT-4Label SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSETSoftmaxTransformer

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections