Repository-Aware File Path Retrieval via Fine-Tuned LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yanuganti, Vasudha, Puri, Ishaan, Chhatre, Swapnil, Singh, Mantinder, Jallepalli, Ashok, Shrivastava, Hritvik, Sharma, Pradeep Kumar
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yanuganti, Vasudha
Puri, Ishaan
Chhatre, Swapnil
Singh, Mantinder
Jallepalli, Ashok
Shrivastava, Hritvik
Sharma, Pradeep Kumar
author_facet Yanuganti, Vasudha
Puri, Ishaan
Chhatre, Swapnil
Singh, Mantinder
Jallepalli, Ashok
Shrivastava, Hritvik
Sharma, Pradeep Kumar
contents Modern codebases make it hard for developers and AI coding assistants to find the right source files when answering questions like "How does this feature work?" or "Where was the bug introduced?" Traditional code search (keyword or IR based) often misses semantic context and cross file links, while large language models (LLMs) understand natural language but lack repository specific detail. We present a method for file path retrieval that fine tunes a strong LLM (Qwen3-8B) with QLoRA and Unsloth optimizations to predict relevant file paths directly from a natural language query. To build training data, we introduce six code aware strategies that use abstract syntax tree (AST) structure and repository content to generate realistic question-answer pairs, where answers are sets of file paths. The strategies range from single file prompts to hierarchical repository summaries, providing broad coverage. We fine tune on Python projects including Flask, Click, Jinja, FastAPI, and PyTorch, and obtain high retrieval accuracy: up to 91\% exact match and 93\% recall on held out queries, clearly beating single strategy training. On a large codebase like PyTorch (about 4,000 Python files), the model reaches 59\% recall, showing scalability. We analyze how multi level code signals help the LLM reason over cross file context and discuss dataset design, limits (for example, context length in very large repos), and future integration of retrieval with LLM based code intelligence.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_08850
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Repository-Aware File Path Retrieval via Fine-Tuned LLMs
Yanuganti, Vasudha
Puri, Ishaan
Chhatre, Swapnil
Singh, Mantinder
Jallepalli, Ashok
Shrivastava, Hritvik
Sharma, Pradeep Kumar
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Modern codebases make it hard for developers and AI coding assistants to find the right source files when answering questions like "How does this feature work?" or "Where was the bug introduced?" Traditional code search (keyword or IR based) often misses semantic context and cross file links, while large language models (LLMs) understand natural language but lack repository specific detail. We present a method for file path retrieval that fine tunes a strong LLM (Qwen3-8B) with QLoRA and Unsloth optimizations to predict relevant file paths directly from a natural language query. To build training data, we introduce six code aware strategies that use abstract syntax tree (AST) structure and repository content to generate realistic question-answer pairs, where answers are sets of file paths. The strategies range from single file prompts to hierarchical repository summaries, providing broad coverage. We fine tune on Python projects including Flask, Click, Jinja, FastAPI, and PyTorch, and obtain high retrieval accuracy: up to 91\% exact match and 93\% recall on held out queries, clearly beating single strategy training. On a large codebase like PyTorch (about 4,000 Python files), the model reaches 59\% recall, showing scalability. We analyze how multi level code signals help the LLM reason over cross file context and discuss dataset design, limits (for example, context length in very large repos), and future integration of retrieval with LLM based code intelligence.
title Repository-Aware File Path Retrieval via Fine-Tuned LLMs
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08850