arXiv AI

Find Before You Fine-Tune: A Diagnostic Study of Small LLMs for Cybersecurity QA

arXiv:2607. 18725v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly fine-tuned for critical-domain Question-Answering (QA), yet choosing which small model to adapt, before paying the cost of adaptation, remains difficult.

arXiv AI
Jul 2

Toward Cybersecurity-Expert Small Language Models

arXiv:2510. 14113v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are transforming everyday applications, yet deployment in cybersecurity lags due to a lack of high-quality, domain-specific models and training datasets.

By Matan Levi, Daniel Ohayon, Ariel Blobstein, Ravid Sagi, Ian Molloy, Yair Allouche
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

MITRE-SAGE: A Multi-Agent Cybersecurity Question-Answering Model

MITRE‑SAGE is a multi‑agent retrieval‑augmented generation framework that combines semantic and structural cybersecurity knowledge to enhance large language model question‑answering. It decomposes tasks into query interpretation, evidence retrieval, and answer synthesis, supporting vulnerability assessment, threat profiling, and relationship extraction. The authors also introduce MITRE‑QA, a benchmark of 3,000 question‑answer pairs, and show that MITRE‑SAGE outperforms standalone LLMs and conventional RAG methods, with a lightweight configuration achieving top performance on most tasks.

By Ali Habibzadeh, Farid Feyzi, Reza Ebrahimi Atani
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

MITRE-SAGE: A Multi-Agent Cybersecurity Question-Answering model

MITRE‑SAGE is a multi‑agent retrieval‑augmented generation framework that combines semantic and structural cybersecurity knowledge to enhance large language model question‑answering. It decomposes tasks into query interpretation, evidence retrieval, and answer synthesis, supporting vulnerability assessment, threat profiling, and relationship extraction. Experiments show that MITRE‑SAGE outperforms standalone LLMs and conventional RAG methods, with a lightweight Qwen2.5‑based configuration excelling on most benchmark tasks.

By Ali Habibzadeh, Farid Feyzi, Reza Ebrahimi Atani
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 17

Evaluating Open-Source LLMs for Multi-Label ATT&CK Technique Classification on CTI Reports

arXiv:2606. 18166v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Classifying Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) using MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) is essential for proactive defense, but historically required extensive human effort.

By Ahmed Ryan, Saad Sakib Noor, Md Erfan, Shaswata Mitra, Sudip Mittal, Md Rayhanur Rahman
arXiv AI
Jul 8

Beyond Refusal: A Same-Lineage Study of Aligned and Abliterated LLMs for Vulnerability Analysis

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 AI
Sep 17

MiST: Mid-Training LLMs for Cybersecurity

MiST (Mid-trained Security Transformer) is a suite of 8B and 32B language models tailored for cybersecurity, achieving strong performance on public benchmarks. The approach uses a mid-training stage that adapts general pre-trained models to the domain by curating a compact, expert-vetted seed corpus and generating high-quality synthetic training data, rather than continual pre-training on large raw text. MiST checkpoints improve mean cybersecurity accuracy by +13.1 and +8.6 absolute percentage points over Qwen baselines for 8B and 32B models, respectively, and provide a stronger initialization for downstream task-specific fine-tuning and reinforcement learning.

By Oded Ovadia, Elad Ben Zaken, Elad Guttman, Orly Moreno Kadosh