RepoNav: From Snippet Retrieval to File-Centered Repository Navigation for Code Agents

Abstract:Solving repository-level code tasks requires LLM-based agents to use code search tools to navigate large codebases and identify a small set of relevant files and functions. However, current retrieval tools typically return flat lists of isolated code snippets: such lists can surface relevant files, but provide insufficient structure for agents to distinguish the target function from semantically similar alternatives in the same file. We introduce RepoNav, a lightweight post-retrieval interface that reorganizes retrieved snippets into a file-centered navigation scaffold. By presenting compact structural cues and candidate targets, this scaffold guides on-demand file-structure browsing, helping agents compare sibling symbols before selecting a target function. Across diverse models on LocBench, RepoNav improves function-level localization and narrows the file-to-function gap. Controlled ablations demonstrate that these gains come from structured evidence organization rather than simply exposing additional file structure, and the approach also improves performance on a repository-level question-answering benchmark.

Software Engineering (cs.SE); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.08355 [cs.SE]

(or arXiv:2609.08355v1 [cs.SE] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.08355 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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