# Towards Exception Safety Code Generation with Intermediate Representation Agents Framework

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.06949 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06949/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 14 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Software engineering coding agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/software-engineering-coding-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12950/) (2023)
- [SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15793/) (2024)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-Coder: When the Large Language Model Meets Programming -- The Rise of Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14196/) (2024)
- [StarCoder: may the source be with you!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06161/) (2023)
- [WizardCoder: Empowering Code Large Language Models with Evol-Instruct](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08568/) (2023)
- [Visual ChatGPT: Talking, Drawing and Editing with Visual Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04671/) (2023)
- [Self-collaboration Code Generation via ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07590/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Code: Security Hardening and Adversarial Testing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05319/) (2023)
- [MAGIS: LLM-Based Multi-Agent Framework for GitHub Issue Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17927/) (2024)
- [DevEval: A Manually-Annotated Code Generation Benchmark Aligned with Real-World Code Repositories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19856/) (2024)
- [From Misuse to Mastery: Enhancing Code Generation with Knowledge-Driven AI Chaining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15606/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [DREAMS: Density Functional Theory Based Research Engine for Agentic Materials Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14267/) (2025)
- [Cognition-of-Thought Elicits Social-Aligned Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23441/) (2025)
- [From Statute to Control Flow: Span-Grounded Deontic Trees for Defeasible Scope Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08932/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with robust exception handling in generated code, leading to fragile programs that are prone to runtime errors. We propose Seeker, a novel multi-agent framework that enforces exception safety in LLM generated code through an Intermediate Representation (IR) approach. Seeker decomposes exception handling into five specialized agents: Scanner, Detector, Predator, Ranker, and Handler that collaboratively analyze code, detect fragile segments, retrieve best practice exception strategies, and inject robust handling code. We also introduce Common Exception Enumeration (CEE), a comprehensive knowledge base derived from official documentation, technical practices, and real world code, to standardize exception handling strategies. Seeker also incorporates a Deep Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Deep RAG) algorithm to efficiently navigate the exception inheritance hierarchy, cutting down search overhead by 93% while improving accuracy in identifying relevant exceptions. We evaluate Seeker on 15 open source Java projects and multiple benchmarks. Seeker outperforms state of the art baselines, improving exception handling precision by up to 37% and overall code robustness by 38% as measured by expert code review. It significantly closes the gap between LLM and human developers in exception management, achieving a 28% success rate on real world issue fixes (SWE bench) versus 19% by prior methods. Our framework preserves functional correctness of code while proactively handling errors, demonstrating a practical, generalizable solution for safer code generation. In this paper, we discuss the novelty of using intermediate representation and multi-agent collaboration for exception handling, and outline how Seeker can be extended to other programming languages and complex software engineering tasks, aligning LLM-generated code with industrial standard.