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: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?
By Ronghao Ni, Aidan Z. H. Yang, Min-Chien Hsu, Nuno Sabino, Limin Jia, Ruben Martins, Darion Cassel, Kevin Cheang
arXiv:2408. 16028v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Supervised-learning-based vulnerability detectors often fall short due to limited labelled training data.
By Weizhou Wang, Eric Liu, Xiangyu Guo, Xiao Hu, Ilya Grishchenko, David Lie
arXiv:2604. 04977v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Software supply chain security compromises often stem from cascaded interactions of vulnerabilities, for example, between multiple vulnerable components.
By Laura Baird, Armin Moin
arXiv:2606. 17283v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Achieving reproducibility, quantity, and diversity in vulnerability datasets has long been viewed as an inherent three-way trade-off, where improving one dimension often comes at the cost of the others.
By Xiang Mei, Jordi Del Castillo, Pulkit Singh Singaria, Haoran Xi, Abdelouahab Benchikh, Tiffany Bao, Ruoyu Wang, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Adam Doup\'e, Hammond Pearce, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt
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.
By Shenao Yan, Shan Jin, Shimaa Ahmed, Sunpreet Singh Arora, Yiwei Cai, Yizhen Wang, Yuan Hong
arXiv:2608.22089v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Modern software systems require earlier and more scalable vulnerability severity assessment to reduce exposure to high-impact security flaws. Securit...
By Daniel Rodriguez-Cardenas, David Nader Palacio, Anna Schmedding, Yiyang Lu, Aadil Mallick, Bill Hudson, Chris Gourley, Michael Roytman, Chris Shenefiel, Evgenia Smirni, Denys Poshyvanyk
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
arXiv:2606. 15123v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the task of CVE-conditioned exploit generation, where a model drafts proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits given software vulnerability context.
By Yiwei Chen, Lichi Li, Kai Cheung, Vinny Parla, Ganesh Sundaram
arXiv:2608. 12246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Evaluating security vulnerability detection tools requires benchmark datasets with vulnerability-inducing commits (VICs) - the commits that first introduce vulnerabilities into codebases.
By Jin Lu, Xuening Han, Yang Zhong, Lin Tan, Kevin Luo, Andrew Gacek, Neha Rungta
arXiv:2606. 20502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Whether LLMs scoring well on vulnerability benchmarks genuinely reason about security or merely pattern-match on contaminated data remains unresolved.
By Arastoo Zibaeirad, Marco Vieira
arXiv:2606. 16244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models routinely generate code with exploitable security flaws.
By Xiaoyun Xu, Lichao Wu, Jona te Lintelo, Siyu Zhang, Stjepan Picek