Towards Engineering Multi-Agent LLMs: A Protocol-Driven Approach

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Mao, Zhenyu, Keung, Jacky, Zhang, Fengji, Liu, Shuo, Wang, Yifei, Li, Jialong
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Mao, Zhenyu
Keung, Jacky
Zhang, Fengji
Liu, Shuo
Wang, Yifei
Li, Jialong
author_facet Mao, Zhenyu
Keung, Jacky
Zhang, Fengji
Liu, Shuo
Wang, Yifei
Li, Jialong
contents The increasing demand for software development has driven interest in automating software engineering (SE) tasks using Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent efforts extend LLMs into multi-agent systems (MAS) that emulate collaborative development workflows, but these systems often fail due to three core deficiencies: under-specification, coordination misalignment, and inappropriate verification, arising from the absence of foundational SE structuring principles. This paper introduces Software Engineering Multi-Agent Protocol (SEMAP), a protocol-layer methodology that instantiates three core SE design principles for multi-agent LLMs: (1) explicit behavioral contract modeling, (2) structured messaging, and (3) lifecycle-guided execution with verification, and is implemented atop Google's Agent-to-Agent (A2A) infrastructure. Empirical evaluation using the Multi-Agent System Failure Taxonomy (MAST) framework demonstrates that SEMAP effectively reduces failures across different SE tasks. In code development, it achieves up to a 69.6% reduction in total failures for function-level development and 56.7% for deployment-level development. For vulnerability detection, SEMAP reduces failure counts by up to 47.4% on Python tasks and 28.2% on C/C++ tasks.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_12120
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Engineering Multi-Agent LLMs: A Protocol-Driven Approach
Mao, Zhenyu
Keung, Jacky
Zhang, Fengji
Liu, Shuo
Wang, Yifei
Li, Jialong
Software Engineering
The increasing demand for software development has driven interest in automating software engineering (SE) tasks using Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent efforts extend LLMs into multi-agent systems (MAS) that emulate collaborative development workflows, but these systems often fail due to three core deficiencies: under-specification, coordination misalignment, and inappropriate verification, arising from the absence of foundational SE structuring principles. This paper introduces Software Engineering Multi-Agent Protocol (SEMAP), a protocol-layer methodology that instantiates three core SE design principles for multi-agent LLMs: (1) explicit behavioral contract modeling, (2) structured messaging, and (3) lifecycle-guided execution with verification, and is implemented atop Google's Agent-to-Agent (A2A) infrastructure. Empirical evaluation using the Multi-Agent System Failure Taxonomy (MAST) framework demonstrates that SEMAP effectively reduces failures across different SE tasks. In code development, it achieves up to a 69.6% reduction in total failures for function-level development and 56.7% for deployment-level development. For vulnerability detection, SEMAP reduces failure counts by up to 47.4% on Python tasks and 28.2% on C/C++ tasks.
title Towards Engineering Multi-Agent LLMs: A Protocol-Driven Approach
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12120