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) lifecycleguided 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 $\mathbf{5 6 . 7 \%}$ for deployment-level development. For vulnerability detection, SEMAP reduces failure counts by up to $47.4 \%$ on Python tasks and $28.2 \%$ on $\mathrm{C} / \mathrm{C}++$ tasks.

Daoguang Zan, Bei Chen, Fengji Zhang, Dianjie Lu, Bingchao Wu, Bei Guan, Wang Yongji, Jian-Guang Lou. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.

Fengji Zhang, Bei Chen, Yue Zhang, Jacky Keung, Jin Liu, Daoguang Zan, Yi Mao, Jian-Guang Lou, Weizhu Chen. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2023.

With the popularity of automatic code generation tools, such as Copilot, the study of the potential hazards of these tools is gaining importance. In this work, we explore the social bias problem in pre-trained code generation models. We propose a new paradigm to construct code prompts and successfully uncover social biases in code generation models. To quantify the severity of social biases in generated code, we develop a dataset along with three metrics to evaluate the overall social bias and fine-grained unfairness across different demographics. Experimental results on three pre-trained code generation models (Codex, InCoder, and CodeGen) with varying sizes, reveal severe social biases. Moreover, we conduct analysis to provide useful insights for further choice of code generation models with low social bias.