# SaraCoder: Orchestrating Semantic and Structural Cues for Resource-Optimized Repository-Level Code Completion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10068 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10068/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RAG for code, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 20 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [RAG for code](https://mlsanity.com/rag/rag-for-code/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [Competition-Level Code Generation with AlphaCode](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07814/) (2022)
- [CodeBERT: A Pre-Trained Model for Programming and Natural Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08155/) (2020)
- [DeepSeek-Coder: When the Large Language Model Meets Programming -- The Rise of Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14196/) (2024)
- [CodeGen: An Open Large Language Model for Code with Multi-Turn Program Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13474/) (2022)
- [CodeXGLUE: A Machine Learning Benchmark Dataset for Code Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04664/) (2021)
- [CodeSearchNet Challenge: Evaluating the State of Semantic Code Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09436/) (2019)
- [GraphCodeBERT: Pre-training Code Representations with Data Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08366/) (2020)
- [RepoBench: Benchmarking Repository-Level Code Auto-Completion Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03091/) (2023)
- [CrossCodeEval: A Diverse and Multilingual Benchmark for Cross-File Code Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11248/) (2023)
- [SantaCoder: don't reach for the stars!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03988/) (2023)
- [ReACC: A Retrieval-Augmented Code Completion Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07722/) (2022)
- [CERT: Continual Pre-Training on Sketches for Library-Oriented Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06888/) (2022)
- [CoCoMIC: Code Completion By Jointly Modeling In-file and Cross-file Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10007/) (2022)
- [CodeFill: Multi-token Code Completion by Jointly Learning from Structure and Naming Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06689/) (2022)
- [Dataflow-Guided Retrieval Augmentation for Repository-Level Code Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19782/) (2024)
- [GREED: A Neural Framework for Learning Graph Distance Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13143/) (2021)
- [CodeRetriever: Unimodal and Bimodal Contrastive Learning for Code Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10866/) (2022)
- [Domain Adaptive Code Completion via Language Models and Decoupled Domain Databases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09313/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has advanced repository-level code completion by retrieving external code snippets, API documentation, or type definitions to expand the model's contextual awareness. However, under the finite token budget of the context window, existing retrieval-augmented methods often saturate the budget with highly similar or even redundant code, which not only wastes tokens but also suppresses critical cross-file dependencies, preventing synergistic interaction between semantically similar reference snippets and cross-file dependency definitions. Therefore, further gains are limited by low knowledge density in the retrieved context rather than by model capacity. We propose SaraCoder, a retrieval-augmented framework that enhances knowledge density via hierarchical context pruning under a fixed context budget. A Hierarchical Feature Optimization module prunes an over-complete candidate pool in four stages. The freed tokens are then allocated to an External-Aware Identifier Disambiguator, which selectively injects only the most necessary cross-file dependency definitions. SaraCoder transforms context construction into a budget-aware optimization problem, balancing reference snippets and cross-file dependencies to build a context that is both knowledge-dense and semantically complete. Experiments on CrossCodeEval and RepoEval-Updated, across multiple backbone code LLMs, show that SaraCoder consistently outperforms strong RAG baselines such as GraphCoder and Repocoder in both code-level and identifier-level metrics, without increasing token usage, and yields synergistic gains when combined with other cross-file methods.