The paper surveys 87 influential studies on machine‑learning‑based automated vulnerability detection (ML4AVD), categorizing them by problem formulation, input and detection granularity, target languages, evaluation metrics, datasets, and detection approaches. It identifies twelve self‑reinforcing pain points—such as overreliance on binary classification of C/C++ function‑level vulnerabilities, limited language coverage, and intertwined datasets, baselines, and metrics—that trap the field in a narrow, artificial problem space. The authors propose concrete recommendations to break these feedback loops and evaluate a recent high‑profile effort, AIxCC, against these guidelines, reflecting on ML4AVD’s relevance amid the rise of agentic AI.
arXiv:2512. 10485v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vulnerability detection methods based on deep learning (DL) have shown strong performance on benchmark datasets, yet their real-world effectiveness remains underexplored.
arXiv:2510. 20739v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Program analysis tools often produce large volumes of candidate vulnerability reports that require costly manual review, creating a practical challenge: how can security analysts prioritize the reports most likely to be true vulnerabilities?
arXiv:2606. 14295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frontier AI systems are increasingly capable of cybersecurity tasks, including codebase inspection, vulnerability detection, and exploitation.
The paper introduces CodeScan, a black-box, vulnerability-oriented scanning framework designed to detect data poisoning and backdoor attacks in code generation large language models (LLMs). CodeScan operates by analyzing structural similarities across multiple code generations, normalizing them with abstract syntax tree (AST) techniques, and then applying LLM-based vulnerability analysis to identify recurring insecure patterns. Evaluations on 117 models across three architectures and multiple sizes show over 97% detection accuracy with fewer false positives compared to prior methods.
arXiv:2608. 06471v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite recent advances, frontier large language model (LLM) agents remain limited in discovering and patching complex vulnerabilities in real-world software.
arXiv:2606. 19149v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated vulnerability discovery in large codebases remains challenging: traditional static analysis produces high false-positive rates, while dynamic approaches such as fuzzing require substantial infrastructure and often target narrow classes of bugs.
arXiv:2607. 26656v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world vulnerabilities often span multiple functions, yet most learning-based detectors classify each function in isolation: on a sample of real CVEs, we find that 71.
arXiv:2606. 18619v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The advent of agentic vulnerability detection is already becoming a watershed moment for software security.
arXiv:2606. 28403v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vulnerability detection in C/C++ software remains a major security challenge due to code complexity, manual memory management, and the limitations of traditional static analysis.
arXiv:2607. 12058v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Given a vulnerability-fixing commit, trigger localization asks which specific statement turns the vulnerable program state into a concrete unsafe operation.
arXiv:2601. 19138v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Secure code review is critical during pre-integration, where Atlassian developers rely on lightweight analysis tools, while deep security assessment is deferred to later stages, delaying feedback and increasing remediation costs.
arXiv:2609.08040v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The software supply chain has become an increasingly exposed attack surface because of its reliance on intricate yet fragile dependencies. Existing d...