Organizations: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Prairie View A&M University, Prairie View, TX 77446, USA
Abstract
Software development is a complex task that demands cooperation among agents with diverse roles. Large language models (LLMs) have enabled autonomous multi-agent software development frameworks that leverage role-based collaboration to automate requirements analysis, coding, testing, and refinement. However, existing approaches typically assume that intermediate agent outputs are equally reliable, leaving them vulnerable to hallucination propagation, where incorrect decisions generated in early development phases are transferred to downstream agents and negatively impact final software quality. To address this challenge, we propose UA-ChatDev, an uncertainty-aware multi-agent software development framework that integrates uncertainty quantification into agent interactions. It introduces a lightweight uncertainty estimation mechanism based on token-level log probabilities to assess the confidence of agent responses and employs phase-aware threshold calibration to selectively trigger retrieval-based verification when uncertainty exceeds acceptable levels. Extensive experiments on the SRDD benchmark demonstrate that UA-ChatDev consistently outperforms existing single-agent and multi-agent software development frameworks across completeness, executability, consistency, and overall quality metrics. Further ablation studies and communication analyses verify that uncertainty-aware interactions enhance code execution reliability.
Large language models are rapidly moving towards closing the development cycle, transitioning from simple assistive companions to autonomous contributors deeply embedded into collaborative development environments. Despite their accelerated adoption, existing evaluation techniques are limited due to their fragmented nature and distorted projection of true model capabilities, often obtained from hypothetical syntactic scenarios. This research aims to bridge this gap by providing a comprehensive evaluation methodology for LLM-powered agents that is grounded in real-world software development practice. Our evaluation approach focuses on contamination-awareness, in-the-wild agentic behavior assessment, and trajectory-aware benchmarks and metrics capturing realistic coding contexts, human-aligned behavior, and model failure modes.
As Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in open-ended domains like software engineering, they frequently encounter underspecified instructions that lack crucial context. While human developers naturally resolve underspecification by asking clarifying questions, current agents are largely optimized for autonomous execution. In this work, we systematically evaluate the clarification-seeking abilities of LLM agents on an underspecified variant of SWE-bench Verified. We propose an uncertainty-aware multi-agent scaffold that decouples underspecification detection from code execution. Across both proprietary and open-weight frontier LLMs, our scaffold achieves a 69.40% task resolve rate, significantly outperforming a standard single-agent setup and closing the performance gap with agents operating on fully specified instructions. Furthermore, we find that the multi-agent system exhibits well-calibrated information-seeking behavior, conserving queries on simple tasks while proactively seeking information on more complex issues. These findings indicate that current models can be turned into proactive collaborators, where agents independently recognize when to ask questions to elicit missing information in real-world, underspecified tasks.
Multi-agent code generation offers a promising paradigm for autonomous software development by simulating the human software engineering lifecycle. However, system reliability remains hindered by LLM hallucinations and error propagation across interacting agents. While semantic entropy provides a principled way to quantify uncertainty without ground-truth answers, current methods often rely on costly LLM-driven equivalence checks. In this work, we introduce Fast Adaptive Semantic Entropy (FASE), a novel metric that approximates functional correctness based on the minimum spanning tree of structural and semantic dissimilarity graphs. Evaluations on HumanEval and BigCodeBench demonstrate that FASE outperforms state-of-the-art semantic entropy by LLM entailment, achieving a 25% average improvement in Spearman correlation and a 19% increase in ROCAUC score against Pass@1 from ground-truth test cases when using the Qwen3-Embedding-8B model. Furthermore, by eliminating costly LLM-driven equivalence evaluation, FASE incurs negligible computational overhead, requiring only approximately 0.3% of the runtime cost of traditional semantic entropy approaches. These results position FASE as a practical, cost-effective solution for optimizing uncertainty quantification in real-world multi-agent workflows.