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Autori principali: Chowdhury, Oishik, Savarimuthu, Bastin Tony Roy, Licorish, Sherlock A.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17329
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author Chowdhury, Oishik
Savarimuthu, Bastin Tony Roy
Licorish, Sherlock A.
author_facet Chowdhury, Oishik
Savarimuthu, Bastin Tony Roy
Licorish, Sherlock A.
contents Design patterns provide reusable solutions to recurring software design problems. Automatically detecting these patterns in source code can help bootstrap new developers' understanding of unfamiliar software system architectures, and can help experienced developers to quickly identify and rectify potential quality issues. While many prior research works have explored graph based and machine-learning based detection techniques, this work evaluates the design pattern recognition capabilities of four Large Language Models and two ensemble approaches consisting three out of the four models. We also compare their performance when prompted with a) Source code, b) PlantUML representation of source code, and c) Text-based descriptions of the source code. We investigate the detection of five design patterns: singleton, adapter, bridge, composite and decorator. Our preliminary results indicate that LLMs show promise for automatically detecting design patterns, with NextCoder and Gemma 3 demonstrating comparatively higher accuracy than other models evaluated, and the ensemble approaches enhancing the overall efficiency of design pattern detection. We identify several directions for future work.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_17329
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Pilot Study on Detecting Software Design Patterns with Large Language Models: An Empirical Evaluation
Chowdhury, Oishik
Savarimuthu, Bastin Tony Roy
Licorish, Sherlock A.
Software Engineering
Design patterns provide reusable solutions to recurring software design problems. Automatically detecting these patterns in source code can help bootstrap new developers' understanding of unfamiliar software system architectures, and can help experienced developers to quickly identify and rectify potential quality issues. While many prior research works have explored graph based and machine-learning based detection techniques, this work evaluates the design pattern recognition capabilities of four Large Language Models and two ensemble approaches consisting three out of the four models. We also compare their performance when prompted with a) Source code, b) PlantUML representation of source code, and c) Text-based descriptions of the source code. We investigate the detection of five design patterns: singleton, adapter, bridge, composite and decorator. Our preliminary results indicate that LLMs show promise for automatically detecting design patterns, with NextCoder and Gemma 3 demonstrating comparatively higher accuracy than other models evaluated, and the ensemble approaches enhancing the overall efficiency of design pattern detection. We identify several directions for future work.
title A Pilot Study on Detecting Software Design Patterns with Large Language Models: An Empirical Evaluation
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17329