arXiv AI

MetaVul: Agentic Harness Discovery for Vulnerability Detection

MetaVul is a self‑improving framework that discovers and refines harnesses—code scaffolding around large language model agents—for vulnerability detection. Starting from a seed reasoning scaffold, it iteratively optimizes harnesses using feedback from paired vulnerable and patched functions, producing Pareto‑optimal designs that can be reused across different models. Experiments show that optimized harnesses can boost pairwise vulnerability detection by up to 25.8 percentage points and transfer effectively between models without further tuning.

arXiv AI
Sep 7

Direction for Detection: A Survey of Automated Vulnerability Detection and all of its Pain Points

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.

By Dan Ristea, Shae McFadden, Ezzeldin Shereen, Madeleine Dwyer, Sanyam Vyas, Chris Hicks, Vasilios Mavroudis
arXiv AI
Sep 4

PatchBench: Evaluating AI Agents for Vulnerability Patching

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
arXiv AI
Jul 31

Graph Is the Verifier: Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Interprocedural Vulnerability Detection

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.

By Yikun Li, Ting Zhang, Jiakun Liu, Jinfeng Jiang, Yuheng Yieh, Yixin Yang, Wen Bin Leow, Yide Yin, Yintong Huo, Eng Lieh Ouh, Lwin Khin Shar, David Lo
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 18

OpenAnt: LLM-Powered Vulnerability Discovery Through Code Decomposition, Adversarial Verification, and Dynamic Testing

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.

By Nahum Korda, Gadi Evron