Paper
CL4SE: A Context Learning Benchmark For Software Engineering Tasks
Authors
Haichuan Hu, Ye Shang, Guoqing Xie, Congqing He, Quanjun Zhang
Abstract
Context engineering has emerged as a pivotal paradigm for unlocking the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Software Engineering (SE) tasks, enabling performance gains at test time without model fine-tuning. Despite its success, existing research lacks a systematic taxonomy of SE-specific context types and a dedicated benchmark to quantify the heterogeneous effects of different contexts across core SE workflows. To address this gap, we propose CL4SE (Context Learning for Software Engineering), a comprehensive benchmark featuring a fine-grained taxonomy of four SE-oriented context types (interpretable examples, project-specific context, procedural decision-making context, and positive & negative context), each mapped to a representative task (code generation, code summarization, code review, and patch correctness assessment). We construct high-quality datasets comprising over 13,000 samples from more than 30 open-source projects and evaluate five mainstream LLMs across nine metrics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that context learning yields an average performance improvement of 24.7% across all tasks. Specifically, procedural context boosts code review performance by up to 33% (Qwen3-Max), mixed positive-negative context improves patch assessment by 30% (DeepSeek-V3), project-specific context increases code summarization BLEU by 14.78% (GPT-Oss-120B), and interpretable examples enhance code generation PASS@1 by 5.72% (DeepSeek-V3). CL4SE establishes the first standardized evaluation framework for SE context learning, provides actionable empirical insights into task-specific context design, and releases a large-scale dataset to facilitate reproducible research in this domain.
Metadata
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"raw_xml": "<entry>\n <id>http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.23047v1</id>\n <title>CL4SE: A Context Learning Benchmark For Software Engineering Tasks</title>\n <updated>2026-02-26T14:28:57Z</updated>\n <link href='https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.23047v1' rel='alternate' type='text/html'/>\n <link href='https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.23047v1' rel='related' title='pdf' type='application/pdf'/>\n <summary>Context engineering has emerged as a pivotal paradigm for unlocking the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Software Engineering (SE) tasks, enabling performance gains at test time without model fine-tuning. Despite its success, existing research lacks a systematic taxonomy of SE-specific context types and a dedicated benchmark to quantify the heterogeneous effects of different contexts across core SE workflows. To address this gap, we propose CL4SE (Context Learning for Software Engineering), a comprehensive benchmark featuring a fine-grained taxonomy of four SE-oriented context types (interpretable examples, project-specific context, procedural decision-making context, and positive & negative context), each mapped to a representative task (code generation, code summarization, code review, and patch correctness assessment). We construct high-quality datasets comprising over 13,000 samples from more than 30 open-source projects and evaluate five mainstream LLMs across nine metrics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that context learning yields an average performance improvement of 24.7% across all tasks. Specifically, procedural context boosts code review performance by up to 33% (Qwen3-Max), mixed positive-negative context improves patch assessment by 30% (DeepSeek-V3), project-specific context increases code summarization BLEU by 14.78% (GPT-Oss-120B), and interpretable examples enhance code generation PASS@1 by 5.72% (DeepSeek-V3). CL4SE establishes the first standardized evaluation framework for SE context learning, provides actionable empirical insights into task-specific context design, and releases a large-scale dataset to facilitate reproducible research in this domain.</summary>\n <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.SE'/>\n <published>2026-02-26T14:28:57Z</published>\n <arxiv:comment>23 pages, 4 figures</arxiv:comment>\n <arxiv:primary_category term='cs.SE'/>\n <author>\n <name>Haichuan Hu</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Ye Shang</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Guoqing Xie</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Congqing He</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Quanjun Zhang</name>\n </author>\n </entry>"
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