The first SoK on LLM-based AutoPT frameworks provides a six-dimension taxonomy of agent designs and a unified empirical benchmark evaluating 15 frameworks via over 10 billion tokens and 1,500 manually reviewed logs.
xOffense: An Autonomous Multi-Agent Framework for Penetration Testing with Domain-Adapted Large Language Models
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abstract
This work introduces xOffense, an AI-driven, multi-agent penetration testing framework that shifts the process from labor-intensive, expert-driven manual efforts to fully automated, machine-executable workflows capable of scaling seamlessly with computational infrastructure. At its core, xOffense leverages a fine-tuned, mid-scale open-source LLM (Qwen3-32B) to drive reasoning and decision-making in penetration testing. The framework assigns specialized agents to reconnaissance, vulnerability scanning, and exploitation, with an orchestration layer ensuring seamless coordination across phases. Fine-tuning on Chain-of-Thought penetration testing data further enables the model to generate precise tool commands and perform consistent multi-step reasoning. We evaluate xOffense on two rigorous benchmarks: AutoPenBench and AI-Pentest-Benchmark. The results demonstrate that xOffense consistently outperforms contemporary methods, achieving a sub-task completion rate of 79.17%, decisively surpassing leading systems such as VulnBot and PentestGPT. These findings highlight the potential of domain-adapted mid-scale LLMs, when embedded within structured multi-agent orchestration, to deliver superior, cost-efficient, and reproducible solutions for autonomous penetration testing.
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2026 2verdicts
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PoC-Adapt improves automated PoC exploit generation reliability by 25% and lowers cost using semantic state validation and RL adaptive policies, verifying 12 PoCs from 80 recent CVE attempts at $0.42 each.
citing papers explorer
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Hackers or Hallucinators? A Comprehensive Analysis of LLM-Based Automated Penetration Testing
The first SoK on LLM-based AutoPT frameworks provides a six-dimension taxonomy of agent designs and a unified empirical benchmark evaluating 15 frameworks via over 10 billion tokens and 1,500 manually reviewed logs.
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PoC-Adapt: Semantic-Aware Automated Vulnerability Reproduction with LLM Multi-Agents and Reinforcement Learning-Driven Adaptive Policy
PoC-Adapt improves automated PoC exploit generation reliability by 25% and lowers cost using semantic state validation and RL adaptive policies, verifying 12 PoCs from 80 recent CVE attempts at $0.42 each.