Code Models · 2021

Codex: Evaluating LLMs Trained on Code (HumanEval)

Mark Chen, Jerry Tworek, Heewoo Jun, et al.

Introduced Codex and the HumanEval benchmark, evaluating a GPT model fine-tuned on public code for generating programs from docstrings and measuring correctness by actually running unit tests, establishing execution-based functional evaluation instead of text-overlap metrics.

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Plain-language summary

The model is a GPT language model further trained on a large corpus of GitHub code so it can turn a function signature and docstring into a working implementation. Rather than scoring generated code by similarity to a reference, HumanEval defines 164 hand-written problems with unit tests and reports pass@k, the chance that at least one of k sampled solutions passes all tests. This functional metric, plus the finding that sampling many candidates raises success rates, shaped how code-generation models are evaluated and underpinned tools like GitHub Copilot.

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Record ID
P-340
Record created
2026-07-13
Last reviewed
2026-07-14
Record version
2

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