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.
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.
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: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:2601.19066v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bug Reproduction Tests (BRTs) have been used in many Automated Program Repair (APR) systems, primarily for validating fixes and aiding fix ge...
arXiv:2607. 29422v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated vulnerability repair aims to reduce the time and effort required to patch security flaws from a vulnerability triage report.
arXiv:2604. 11950v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While recent LLM-based agents can identify many candidate bugs in source code, their reports remain static hypotheses that require manual validation, limiting the practicality of automated bug detection.
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.
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.
arXiv:2509. 22097v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model-powered code agents are rapidly transforming software engineering, yet the security risks of their generated code have become a critical concern.
The paper introduces BUGSTONE‑E2E, a framework that converts vulnerability history into executable detection rules and validates them. It mines reusable rules from fixing commits, organizes them by CWE and language, and applies a funnel‑shaped pipeline that starts with lightweight analysis and culminates in LLM‑guided inspection, runtime verification, and patch generation. Using 19,325 high‑severity CVEs, the system identified 2,710 fixing commits, created 1,033 detection rules across 56 CWE families, and produced runtime evidence for 644 findings in 14 programs.
arXiv:2606. 18619v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The advent of agentic vulnerability detection is already becoming a watershed moment for software security.
The paper presents a systematic analysis of five state‑of‑the‑art automated program repair agents, tracing their decision‑making across 500 real‑world repair tasks. It finds that while the agents perform well on simple fixes, they struggle with logic‑intensive bugs, often producing verbose, overfitted patches that pass tests without addressing root causes. Key bottlenecks identified include poor test generation, limited regression test selection, and reliance on primitive tooling without access to debuggers or advanced program analysis tools.