PatchBench introduces a benchmark to evaluate AI agents on realistic vulnerability patching tasks, addressing two key threats to validity: patch memorization and surface-level fixes that merely suppress crashes. The study finds that 25% of agent patches resemble historical developer patches, and that PoC-only validation inflates success rates by 1.83× on average. PatchBench mitigates these issues by selecting vulnerabilities whose true fixes lie outside the crash stack, migrating historical vulnerabilities into new contexts, and employing rigorous validation for security and semantic correctness.
By Chihao Shen, Jiacheng Li, Aastha Mahajan, Jeffery Siyuan Tian, Yonghwi Kwon, Yizheng Chen
The paper introduces Porting Benchmark, a dataset of 1,234 security patch backporting cases covering cross-version, cross-branch, and cross-repository scenarios, along with a unified evaluation framework. Five tools—spanning program analysis, LLM prompting, and LLM agents—are evaluated under aligned settings, revealing that performance varies significantly across tools and patch complexity, with success rates dropping sharply for structurally complex patches. The study identifies four root-cause categories for failures and demonstrates that reference-based benchmark scores may not fully reflect real-world remediation, as executable validation uncovers additional integration issues.
arXiv:2607. 23088v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used for code generation, yet their security behavior in realistic development workflows remains underexplored.
By Lixun Ma, Ruolong Ma, Bei Wang, Feng Wei, Zhenguang Liu, Lorenzo Cavallaro, Wentao Chen
arXiv:2604. 17948v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various cybersecurity tasks, including vulnerability classification, detection, and patching.
By Parteek Jamwal, Minghao Shao, Boyuan Chen, Achyuta Muthuvelan, Asini Subanya, Boubacar Ballo, Kashish Satija, Mariam Shafey, Mohamed Mahmoud, Moncif Dahaji Bouffi, Pasindu Wickramasinghe, Siyona Goel, Yaakulya Sabbani, Hakim Hacid, Mthandazo Ndhlovu, Eleanna Kafeza, Sanjay Rawat, Muhammad Shafique
arXiv:2606. 30587v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Researchers and practitioners increasingly apply Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated vulnerability detection.
By Asif Shahriar, Hongyu Cai, Hadjer Benkraouda, Gang Wang, Z. Berkay Celik
arXiv:2605. 17450v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As software systems grow increasingly complex, automated vulnerability repair (AVR) remains difficult because the materials available to a repair system are usually failure artifacts rather than repair guidance.
By Simiao Liu, Fang Liu, Peiding Wang, Taichuan Li, Yinghao Zhu, Xiaoli Lian, Li Zhang
arXiv:2606. 04739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for automated software vulnerability detection, particularly in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) settings.
By Sabrina Kaniewski, Fabian Schmidt, Tobias Heer
The paper introduces Porting Benchmark, a curated dataset of 1,234 security patch backporting cases that span cross-version, cross-branch, and cross-repository scenarios, along with a common evaluation framework. Five tools—spanning program analysis, LLM prompting, and LLM agents—are evaluated under aligned settings, revealing that performance varies significantly across tools and that complex patches (Type-IV) see a sharp drop in success rate. The study identifies four root-cause categories for failures and demonstrates that reference-based benchmark scores may not fully capture real-world remediation, as executable validation uncovers additional integration issues.
By Jincheng Yang, Yulong Fu, Chengwei Liu, Lyuye Zhang, Fangyuan Zhang, Bingyang Ren, Yang Liu, Hui Li
The paper investigates hallucination in large language model–based automated program repair (APR). It defines hallucination as producing patches or intermediate artifacts that are not grounded in available repair evidence, and analyzes it across final patches and intermediate tasks such as triggering test case identification, line coverage prediction, and additional test case generation. Experiments on 832 Defects4J bugs show that only 21.0%–55.9% of patches pass the developer test suite, with 72.7% of sampled repairs exhibiting hallucinations, often due to incorrect causal localization or repair strategies.
By Xuemeng Cai, Jiakun Liu, Linhan Yang, Wei Ma, Lingxiao Jiang
arXiv:2607. 05842v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-assisted software security operates at a difficult boundary: the vulnerability-analysis terminology needed for legitimate code review, triage, and repair can closely resemble terminology associated with misuse.
By Mingchen Li, Meikang Qiu, Zifan Peng, Heng Fan, Song Fu, Junhua Ding, Yunhe Feng
arXiv:2607. 00990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based software engineering agents are increasingly developed to resolve software issues by generating patches from issue reports and code repositories.
By Yaoqi Guo, Yang Liu, Jie M. Zhang, Yun Ma, Yiling Lou, Zhenpeng Chen
arXiv:2609.06229v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vulnerability discovery is becoming an important ability of large language model (LLM) agents: agents that silently miss real defects leave critical...
By Yuanxiang Shi, Jiayi Lin, Xuanyong Lin, Liangcai Su, Yeheng Duan, Wei Wang, Qi Han, Bing Zhao, Wei Hu, Xander Xu, Chenxiong Qian