MA-RAG: Automating Role Engineering for RESTful APIs with Multi-Head Attention and Retrieval-Augmented Generation

MA-RAG: Automating Role Engineering for RESTful APIs with Multi-Head Attention and Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Yang Luo, Qingni Shen, Zhonghai Wu

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 7607-7615. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/846

This paper addresses the role engineering problem for RESTful applications and proposes a role engineering method based on multi-head attention and Retrieval Augmented Generation called MA-RAG. The method first performs fine-grained control flow analysis on the system source code to extract permission information of API handlers. Then, using basic blocks as units, it employs pre-trained code models to convert the source code into semantic vectors, which are stored in the retrieval augmented generation model. On this basis, a call chain structure tree is constructed with permissions as the center, utilizing the multi-head attention mechanism to aggregate semantic information of different code granularities from bottom to top, with each attention head corresponding to a role engineering objective. Finally, the root vectors of each permission tree are subjected to self-supervised clustering to adaptively determine the number of roles and perform division. We evaluated MA-RAG on 284 real-world software systems, and the results show that compared with other methods, MA-RAG can significantly save time overhead, reduce the number of generated roles, lower the role permission overlap rate, and improve the interpretability score.
Keywords:
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: MTA: Security and privacy
Data Mining: DM: Mining codebase and software repositories
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: MTA: Software engineering
Natural Language Processing: NLP: Language models