EASE 2026
Tue 9 - Fri 12 June 2026 Glasgow, United Kingdom

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Wed 10 Jun 2026 11:15 - 11:30 at JMS 745 - Maintenance and Evolution 2 Chair(s): Andrea Capiluppi

Malicious code in open-source repositories such as PyPI poses a growing threat to software supply chains. Traditional rule-based tools often overlook the semantic patterns in source code that are crucial for identifying adversarial components. Large language models (LLMs) show promise for software analysis, yet their use in interpretable and modular security pipelines remains limited.

This paper presents LAMPS, a multi-agent system that employs collaborative LLMs to detect malicious PyPI packages. The system consists of four role-specific agents for package retrieval, file extraction, classification, and verdict aggregation, coordinated through the CrewAI framework. A prototype combines a fine-tuned CodeBERT model for classification with LLaMA 3 agents for contextual reasoning. LAMPS has been evaluated on two complementary datasets: D1, a balanced collection of 6000 setup.py files, and D2, a realistic multi-file dataset with 1296 files and natural class imbalance. On D1, LAMPS achieves 97.7% accuracy, surpassing MPHunter and TD-IDF stacking models–two state-of-the-art approaches. On D2, it reaches 99.5% accuracy and 99.5% balanced accuracy, outperforming RAG-based approaches and fine-tuned single-agent baselines. McNemar’s test confirmed these improvements as highly significant. The results demonstrate the feasibility of distributed LLM reasoning for malicious code detection and highlight the benefits of modular multi-agent designs in software supply chain security.

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Wed 10 Jun

Displayed time zone: London change

11:00 - 12:30
Maintenance and Evolution 2Journal First / Research Papers / Industry Papers / Reproducibility and Negative Results at JMS 745
Chair(s): Andrea Capiluppi University of Groningen
11:00
15m
Talk
Toward a Prioritization Approach for Third-Party Software Library Updates
Journal First
Abdalrahman Aburakhia King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Mohammad Alshayeb King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals
11:15
15m
Talk
Many hands make light work: An LLM-based multi-agent system for detecting malicious PyPI packages
Journal First
Muhammad Umar Zeshan University of L’Aquila, Italy, Motunrayo Osatohanmen Ibiyo University of L'Aquila, Claudio Di Sipio University of L'Aquila, Phuong T. Nguyen University of L’Aquila, Davide Di Ruscio University of L'Aquila
11:30
15m
Paper
FLOPs vs Real Work: The Importance of Replication in AI Efficiency Assessment
Reproducibility and Negative Results
Enrique Barba Roque Delft University of Technology, Luís Cruz TU Delft
11:45
15m
Talk
An Empirical Evaluation of Code Smell Detection in Angular Applications
Research Papers
Maykon Nunes Universidade Federal do Ceará, Ivan Machado Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), Carla Ilane Bezerra Federal University of Ceara, Emanuel Coutinho Federal University of Ceará
Pre-print
12:00
10m
Talk
Empirical Evaluation of Lift-and-Shift for Decoupling Drivers in Industrial Legacy Software: Lessons from a CGI Case Study
Industry Papers
Bauke van den Berg CGI Netherlands, Andrea Capiluppi University of Groningen
12:10
15m
Talk
Unsafe and Unused? A History of Utility Code in Mature Open Source Projects
Research Papers
Brandon Keller Rochester Institute of Technology, Kaitlin Yandik Rochester Institute of Technology, Angela Ngo Rochester Institute of Technology, Andy Meneely Rochester Institute of Technology
Pre-print