# CoIR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Code Information Retrieval Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02883 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02883/

## Key facts

- Cited by 60 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [CodeBERT: A Pre-Trained Model for Programming and Natural Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08155/) (2020)
- [Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03533/) (2022)
- [BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08663/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [Measuring Coding Challenge Competence With APPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09938/) (2021)
- [CodeXGLUE: A Machine Learning Benchmark Dataset for Code Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04664/) (2021)
- [Towards General Text Embeddings with Multi-stage Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03281/) (2023)
- [CodeSearchNet Challenge: Evaluating the State of Semantic Code Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09436/) (2019)
- [MTEB: Massive Text Embedding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07316/) (2022)
- [RepoCoder: Repository-Level Code Completion Through Iterative Retrieval and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12570/) (2023)
- [UniXcoder: Unified Cross-Modal Pre-training for Code Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03850/) (2022)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for AI-Generated Content: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19473/) (2024)
- [Improving Text Embeddings with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00368/) (2023)
- [OpenCodeInterpreter: Integrating Code Generation with Execution and Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14658/) (2024)
- [Generative Representational Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09906/) (2024)
- [Generation-Augmented Retrieval for Open-domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08553/) (2020)
- [How Can Recommender Systems Benefit from Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05817/) (2023)
- [A Theoretical Analysis of NDCG Type Ranking Measures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1304.6480/) (2013)
- [RetroMAE: Pre-Training Retrieval-oriented Language Models Via Masked Auto-Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12035/) (2022)
- [COIL: Revisit Exact Lexical Match in Information Retrieval with Contextualized Inverted List](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07186/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Retrieval Quality in Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13781/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [Smarter, Better, Faster, Longer: A Modern Bidirectional Encoder for Fast, Memory Efficient, and Long Context Finetuning and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13663/) (2024)
- [jina-embeddings-v4: Universal Embeddings for Multimodal Multilingual Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18902/) (2025)
- [mmBERT: A Modern Multilingual Encoder with Annealed Language Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06888/) (2025)
- [MMDocIR: Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval for Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08828/) (2025)
- [τ-Knowledge: Evaluating Conversational Agents over Unstructured Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04370/) (2026)
- [CoRNStack: High-Quality Contrastive Data for Better Code Retrieval and Reranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01007/) (2024)
- [CodeXEmbed: A Generalist Embedding Model Family for Multiligual and Multi-task Code Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12644/) (2024)
- [jina-reranker-v3: Last but Not Late Interaction for Listwise Document Reranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25085/) (2025)
- [SweRank: Software Issue Localization with Code Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07849/) (2025)
- [Collapse of Dense Retrievers: Short, Early, and Literal Biases Outranking Factual Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05037/) (2025)
- [O1 Embedder: Let Retrievers Think Before Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07555/) (2025)
- [FreshStack: Building Realistic Benchmarks for Evaluating Retrieval on Technical Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13128/) (2025)
- [Efficient Code Embeddings from Code Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21290/) (2025)
- [F2LLM-v2: Inclusive, Performant, and Efficient Embeddings for a Multilingual World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19223/) (2026)
- [ProRank: Prompt Warmup via Reinforcement Learning for Small Language Models Reranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03487/) (2025)
- [A Deep Dive Into Large Language Model Code Generation Mistakes: What and Why?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01414/) (2024)
- [Position: Text Embeddings Should Capture Implicit Semantics, Not Just Surface Meaning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08354/) (2025)
- [Gemini Embedding 2: A Native Multimodal Embedding Model from Gemini](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27295/) (2026)
- [Granite Embedding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20204/) (2025)
- [Granite Embedding R2 Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21085/) (2025)
- [Unlocking Multimodal Document Intelligence: From Current Triumphs to Future Frontiers of Visual Document Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19961/) (2026)
- [CORE-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Code Retrieval in the Era of Agentic Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11864/) (2026)
- [MIRB: Mathematical Information Retrieval Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15585/) (2025)
- [CoQuIR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Code Quality-Aware Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11066/) (2025)
- [Humanity's Last Code Exam: Can Advanced LLMs Conquer Human's Hardest Code Competition?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12713/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking Information Retrieval Models on Complex Retrieval Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07253/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking AI Models in Software Engineering: A Review, Search Tool, and Unified Approach for Elevating Benchmark Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05860/) (2025)
- [CoRet: Improved Retriever for Code Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24715/) (2025)
- [Revela: Dense Retriever Learning via Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16552/) (2025)
- [C2LLM Technical Report: A New Frontier in Code Retrieval via Adaptive Cross-Attention Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21332/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the substantial success of Information Retrieval (IR) in various NLP tasks, most IR systems predominantly handle queries and corpora in natural language, neglecting the domain of code retrieval. Code retrieval is critically important yet remains under-explored, with existing methods and benchmarks inadequately representing the diversity of code in various domains and tasks. Addressing this gap, we present COIR (Code Information Retrieval Benchmark), a robust and comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to assess code retrieval capabilities. COIR comprises ten meticulously curated code datasets, spanning eight distinctive retrieval tasks across seven diverse domains. We first discuss the construction of COIR and its diverse dataset composition. Further, we evaluate nine widely used retrieval models using COIR, uncovering significant difficulties in performing code retrieval tasks even with state-of-the-art systems. To facilitate easy adoption and integration within existing research workflows, COIR has been developed as a user-friendly Python framework, readily installable via pip. It shares same data schema as other popular benchmarks like MTEB and BEIR, enabling seamless cross-benchmark evaluations. Through COIR, we aim to invigorate research in the code retrieval domain, providing a versatile benchmarking tool that encourages further development and exploration of code retrieval systems. https://github.com/CoIR-team/coir.