Pith. sign in

REVIEW 5 cited by

Benchmarking LLMs and LLM-based Agents in Practical Vulnerability Detection for Code Repositories

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2503.03586 v2 pith:GNZZ3U3K submitted 2025-03-05 cs.CR

Benchmarking LLMs and LLM-based Agents in Practical Vulnerability Detection for Code Repositories

classification cs.CR
keywords detectionvulnerabilityllmsagentscontextinterprocedurallikebenchmarks
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
Share X Bluesky LinkedIn Reddit HN
read the original abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in software vulnerability detection, particularly on function-level benchmarks like Devign and BigVul. However, real-world detection requires interprocedural analysis, as vulnerabilities often emerge through multi-hop function calls rather than isolated functions. While repository-level benchmarks like ReposVul and VulEval introduce interprocedural context, they remain computationally expensive, lack pairwise evaluation of vulnerability fixes, and explore limited context retrieval, limiting their practicality. We introduce JitVul, a JIT vulnerability detection benchmark linking each function to its vulnerability-introducing and fixing commits. Built from 879 CVEs spanning 91 vulnerability types, JitVul enables comprehensive evaluation of detection capabilities. Our results show that ReAct Agents, leveraging thought-action-observation and interprocedural context, perform better than LLMs in distinguishing vulnerable from benign code. While prompting strategies like Chain-of-Thought help LLMs, ReAct Agents require further refinement. Both methods show inconsistencies, either misidentifying vulnerabilities or over-analyzing security guards, indicating significant room for improvement.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. RealVuln: Benchmarking Rule-Based, General-Purpose LLM, and Security-Specialized Scanners on Real-World Code

    cs.CR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    RealVuln benchmark finds security-specialized scanners outperform general-purpose LLMs and rule-based SAST tools on hand-labeled vulnerable Python code under F3 scoring, with all artifacts released.

  2. Acoda: Adversarial Code Obfuscation for Defending against LLM-based Analysis

    cs.SE 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Acoda uses a genetic algorithm to optimize eight obfuscation methods that reduce LLM code analysis success rates to as low as 30% while preserving original semantics.

  3. Three Heads Are Better Than One: A Multi-perspective Reasoning Framework for Enhanced Vulnerability Detection

    cs.SE 2026-05 conditional novelty 6.0

    ReasonVul deploys three LLM agents with independent analysis and structured debate to achieve 40% PairAcc and 72.52% F1 on PrimeVul, outperforming baselines by 81% in PairAcc.

  4. The End of Code Review: Coding Agents Supersede Human Inspection

    cs.SE 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Coding agents have reached a capability level where human code review is no longer necessary because agents can serve every review goal more efficiently and the hybrid human-reviewer model does not scale.

  5. Systematizing Blockchain Research Themes and Design Patterns: Insights from the University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI)

    cs.DC 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    UBRI case study abstracts recurring blockchain design tensions into a framework linking academic research to deployment constraints and policy adaptation.