Xin Qian


2025

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DocAgent: A Multi-Agent System for Automated Code Documentation Generation
Dayu Yang | Antoine Simoulin | Xin Qian | Xiaoyi Liu | Yuwei Cao | Zhaopu Teng | Grey Yang
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)

High-quality code documentation is crucial for software development especially in the era of AI. However, generating it automatically using Large Language Models (LLMs) remains challenging, as existing approaches often produce incomplete, unhelpful, or factually incorrect outputs. We introduce DocAgent, a novel multi-agent collaborative system using topological code processing for incremental context building. Specialized agents (Reader, Searcher, Writer, Verifier, Orchestrator) then collaboratively generate documentation. We also propose a multi-faceted evaluation framework assessing Completeness, Helpfulness, and Truthfulness. Comprehensive experiments show DocAgent significantly outperforms baselines consistently. Our ablation study confirms the vital role of the topological processing order. DocAgent offers a robust approach for reliable code documentation generation in complex and proprietary repositories.