arXiv AI By Ira Ceka, Arnav Garg, Ryan Lutz, Ting Zhang, Ratnadira Widyasari, Gail Kaiser, Baishakhi Ray

MetaVul: Agentic Harness Discovery for Vulnerability Detection

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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.

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