An LLM-Based Agent-Oriented Approach for Automated Code Design Issue Localization
Maintaining software design quality is crucial for the long-term maintainability and evolution of systems. However, design issues such as poor modularity and excessive complexity often emerge as codebases grow. Developers rely on external tools, such as program analysis techniques, to identify such issues. This work investigates an automated approach for analyzing and localizing design issues using Large Language Models (LLMs). Large language models have demonstrated significant performance on coding tasks, but directly leveraging them for design issue localization is challenging. Large codebases exceed typical LLM context windows, and program analysis tool outputs in non-textual modalities (e.g., graphs or interactive visualizations) are incompatible with LLMs’ natural language inputs. To address these challenges, we propose LOCALIZEAGENT, a novel multi-agent framework for effective design issue localization. LOCALIZEAGENT integrates specialized agents that (1) analyze code to identify potential code design issues, (2) transform program analysis outputs into abstraction-aware LLM-friendly natural language summaries, (3) generate context-aware prompts tailored to specific refactoring types, and (4) leverage LLMs to locate and rank the localized issues based on their relevance. Our evaluation using diverse real-world codebases demonstrates significant improvements over baseline approaches, with LOCALIZEAGENT achieving 138%, 166%, and 206% relative improvements in exact match accuracy for localizing information hiding, complexity, and modularity issues, respectively.
Thu 1 MayDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
11:00 - 12:30 | AI for Design and ArchitectureDemonstrations / SE In Practice (SEIP) / Research Track at 211 Chair(s): Sarah Nadi New York University Abu Dhabi | ||
11:00 15mTalk | An LLM-Based Agent-Oriented Approach for Automated Code Design Issue Localization Research Track Fraol Batole Tulane University, David OBrien Iowa State University, Tien N. Nguyen University of Texas at Dallas, Robert Dyer University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Hridesh Rajan Tulane University | ||
11:15 15mTalk | Distilled Lifelong Self-Adaptation for Configurable Systems Research Track Yulong Ye University of Birmingham, Tao Chen University of Birmingham, Miqing Li University of Birmingham Pre-print | ||
11:30 15mTalk | The Software Librarian: Python Package Insights for Copilot Demonstrations Jasmine Latendresse Concordia University, Nawres Day ISSAT Sousse, SayedHassan Khatoonabadi Concordia University, Montreal, Emad Shihab Concordia University, Montreal | ||
11:45 15mTalk | aiXcoder-7B: A Lightweight and Effective Large Language Model for Code Processing SE In Practice (SEIP) Siyuan Jiang , Jia Li Peking University, He Zong aiXcoder, Huanyu Liu Peking University, Hao Zhu Peking University, Shukai Hu aiXcoder, Erlu Li aiXcoder, Jiazheng Ding aiXcoder, Ge Li Peking University Pre-print | ||
12:00 15mTalk | Leveraging MLOps: Developing a Sequential Classification System for RFQ Documents in Electrical Engineering SE In Practice (SEIP) Claudio Martens Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS), Hammam Abdelwahab Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS), Katharina Beckh Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS), Birgit Kirsch Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS), Vishwani Gupta Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS), Dennis Wegener Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS), Steffen Hoh Schneider Electric | ||
12:15 15mTalk | On Mitigating Code LLM Hallucinations with API Documentation SE In Practice (SEIP) Nihal Jain Amazon Web Services, Robert Kwiatkowski , Baishakhi Ray Columbia University, Murali Krishna Ramanathan AWS AI Labs, Varun Kumar AWS AI Labs |