SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Muhammad Umar Zeshan

Publications and source records attributed to Muhammad Umar Zeshan.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

The Illusion of Agentic Complexity in README.md Generation: Evaluating Single-Agent vs. Multi-Agent RAG Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized to automate several software engineering tasks, including code completion, code summarization, testing, and the generation of repository-level documentation. While Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are often adopted to support such tasks under the premise that task decomposition improves performance, the impact of architectural complexity on practical efficiency remains under-examined. This study empirically evaluates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) dependent architectures for the generation of README files for GitHub repositories. In this work, we conducted a systematic comparison between a Single-Agent pipeline, a specialized MAS, and a developer-guided planning (DevPlan) variant, benchmarked against LARCH -- a state-of-the-art baseline -- and the original ground truth. Results indicate a critical architectural trade-off: the Single-Agent pipeline achieves lexical quality comparable to MAS while reducing token consumption by 86% and operating at twice the speed. In contrast, manual taxonomy analysis demonstrates that MAS achieves high structural consistency (98%), resolving formatting issues observed in single-agent approaches. Autonomous planning is identified as the primary pipeline bottleneck; incorporating lightweight developer-guided plans produces the highest overall documentation quality, surpassing all the analyzed configurations.

cs.SE

Many Hands Make Light Work: An LLM-based Multi-Agent System for Detecting Malicious PyPI Packages

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 6,000 setup.py files, and D2, a realistic multi-file dataset with 1,296 files and natural class imbalance. On D1, LAMPS achieves 97.7% accuracy, surpassing MPHunter--one of the 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.

cs.SE