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Apr 16

Toward a Holistic Evaluation of Robustness in CLIP Models

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models have shown significant potential, particularly in zero-shot classification across diverse distribution shifts. Building on existing evaluations of overall classification robustness, this work aims to provide a more comprehensive assessment of CLIP by introducing several new perspectives. First, we investigate their robustness to variations in specific visual factors. Second, we assess two critical safety objectives--confidence uncertainty and out-of-distribution detection--beyond mere classification accuracy. Third, we evaluate the finesse with which CLIP models bridge the image and text modalities. Fourth, we extend our examination to 3D awareness in CLIP models, moving beyond traditional 2D image understanding. Finally, we explore the interaction between vision and language encoders within modern large multimodal models (LMMs) that utilize CLIP as the visual backbone, focusing on how this interaction impacts classification robustness. In each aspect, we consider the impact of six factors on CLIP models: model architecture, training distribution, training set size, fine-tuning, contrastive loss, and test-time prompts. Our study uncovers several previously unknown insights into CLIP. For instance, the architecture of the visual encoder in CLIP plays a significant role in their robustness against 3D corruption. CLIP models tend to exhibit a bias towards shape when making predictions. Moreover, this bias tends to diminish after fine-tuning on ImageNet. Vision-language models like LLaVA, leveraging the CLIP vision encoder, could exhibit benefits in classification performance for challenging categories over CLIP alone. Our findings are poised to offer valuable guidance for enhancing the robustness and reliability of CLIP models.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 2, 2024

Reasoning with LLMs for Zero-Shot Vulnerability Detection

Automating software vulnerability detection (SVD) remains a critical challenge in an era of increasingly complex and interdependent software systems. Despite significant advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) for code analysis, prevailing evaluation methodologies often lack the context-aware robustness necessary to capture real-world intricacies and cross-component interactions. To address these limitations, we present VulnSage, a comprehensive evaluation framework and a dataset curated from diverse, large-scale open-source system software projects developed in C/C++. Unlike prior datasets, it leverages a heuristic noise pre-filtering approach combined with LLM-based reasoning to ensure a representative and minimally noisy spectrum of vulnerabilities. The framework supports multi-granular analysis across function, file, and inter-function levels and employs four diverse zero-shot prompt strategies: Baseline, Chain-of-Thought, Think, and Think & Verify. Through this evaluation, we uncover that structured reasoning prompts substantially improve LLM performance, with Think & Verify reducing ambiguous responses from 20.3% to 9.1% while increasing accuracy. We further demonstrate that code-specialized models consistently outperform general-purpose alternatives, with performance varying significantly across vulnerability types, revealing that no single approach universally excels across all security contexts. Link to dataset and codes: https://github.com/Erroristotle/VulnSage.git

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 22, 2025

Test vs Mutant: Adversarial LLM Agents for Robust Unit Test Generation

Software testing is a critical, yet resource-intensive phase of the software development lifecycle. Over the years, various automated tools have been developed to aid in this process. Search-based approaches typically achieve high coverage but produce tests with low readability, whereas large language model (LLM)-based methods generate more human-readable tests but often suffer from low coverage and compilability. While the majority of research efforts have focused on improving test coverage and readability, little attention has been paid to enhancing the robustness of bug detection, particularly in exposing corner cases and vulnerable execution paths. To address this gap, we propose AdverTest, a novel adversarial framework for LLM-powered test case generation. AdverTest comprises two interacting agents: a test case generation agent (T) and a mutant generation agent (M). These agents engage in an adversarial loop, where M persistently creates new mutants "hacking" the blind spots of T's current test suite, while T iteratively refines its test cases to "kill" the challenging mutants produced by M. This interaction loop is guided by both coverage and mutation scores, enabling the system to co-evolve toward both high test coverage and bug detection capability. Experimental results in the Defects4J dataset show that our approach improves fault detection rates by 8.56% over the best existing LLM-based methods and by 63.30% over EvoSuite, while also improving line and branch coverage.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 8

ReCode: Robustness Evaluation of Code Generation Models

Code generation models have achieved impressive performance. However, they tend to be brittle as slight edits to a prompt could lead to very different generations; these robustness properties, critical for user experience when deployed in real-life applications, are not well understood. Most existing works on robustness in text or code tasks have focused on classification, while robustness in generation tasks is an uncharted area and to date there is no comprehensive benchmark for robustness in code generation. In this paper, we propose ReCode, a comprehensive robustness evaluation benchmark for code generation models. We customize over 30 transformations specifically for code on docstrings, function and variable names, code syntax, and code format. They are carefully designed to be natural in real-life coding practice, preserve the original semantic meaning, and thus provide multifaceted assessments of a model's robustness performance. With human annotators, we verified that over 90% of the perturbed prompts do not alter the semantic meaning of the original prompt. In addition, we define robustness metrics for code generation models considering the worst-case behavior under each type of perturbation, taking advantage of the fact that executing the generated code can serve as objective evaluation. We demonstrate ReCode on SOTA models using HumanEval, MBPP, as well as function completion tasks derived from them. Interesting observations include: better robustness for CodeGen over InCoder and GPT-J; models are most sensitive to syntax perturbations; more challenging robustness evaluation on MBPP over HumanEval.

  • 14 authors
·
Dec 20, 2022

LLMs in Software Security: A Survey of Vulnerability Detection Techniques and Insights

Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as transformative tools for software vulnerability detection, addressing critical challenges in the security domain. Traditional methods, such as static and dynamic analysis, often falter due to inefficiencies, high false positive rates, and the growing complexity of modern software systems. By leveraging their ability to analyze code structures, identify patterns, and generate repair suggestions, LLMs, exemplified by models like GPT, BERT, and CodeBERT, present a novel and scalable approach to mitigating vulnerabilities. This paper provides a detailed survey of LLMs in vulnerability detection. It examines key aspects, including model architectures, application methods, target languages, fine-tuning strategies, datasets, and evaluation metrics. We also analyze the scope of current research problems, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches. Further, we address challenges such as cross-language vulnerability detection, multimodal data integration, and repository-level analysis. Based on these findings, we propose solutions for issues like dataset scalability, model interpretability, and applications in low-resource scenarios. Our contributions are threefold: (1) a systematic review of how LLMs are applied in vulnerability detection; (2) an analysis of shared patterns and differences across studies, with a unified framework for understanding the field; and (3) a summary of key challenges and future research directions. This work provides valuable insights for advancing LLM-based vulnerability detection. We also maintain and regularly update latest selected paper on https://github.com/OwenSanzas/LLM-For-Vulnerability-Detection

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 10, 2025

On the Robustness of Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis: Rethinking Model, Data, and Training

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims at automatically inferring the specific sentiment polarities toward certain aspects of products or services behind the social media texts or reviews, which has been a fundamental application to the real-world society. Since the early 2010s, ABSA has achieved extraordinarily high accuracy with various deep neural models. However, existing ABSA models with strong in-house performances may fail to generalize to some challenging cases where the contexts are variable, i.e., low robustness to real-world environments. In this study, we propose to enhance the ABSA robustness by systematically rethinking the bottlenecks from all possible angles, including model, data, and training. First, we strengthen the current best-robust syntax-aware models by further incorporating the rich external syntactic dependencies and the labels with aspect simultaneously with a universal-syntax graph convolutional network. In the corpus perspective, we propose to automatically induce high-quality synthetic training data with various types, allowing models to learn sufficient inductive bias for better robustness. Last, we based on the rich pseudo data perform adversarial training to enhance the resistance to the context perturbation and meanwhile employ contrastive learning to reinforce the representations of instances with contrastive sentiments. Extensive robustness evaluations are conducted. The results demonstrate that our enhanced syntax-aware model achieves better robustness performances than all the state-of-the-art baselines. By additionally incorporating our synthetic corpus, the robust testing results are pushed with around 10% accuracy, which are then further improved by installing the advanced training strategies. In-depth analyses are presented for revealing the factors influencing the ABSA robustness.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 19, 2023

Are "Solved Issues" in SWE-bench Really Solved Correctly? An Empirical Study

Automated issue solving aims to resolve real-world issues in software repositories. The most popular benchmarks for automated issue solving are SWE-bench and its human-filtered subset SWE-bench Verified. These benchmarks leverage testing to validate generated patches. However, because testing is rarely exhaustive, a patch may pass the tests but nevertheless fail to match the developers' expectations. Unfortunately, it is currently unclear to what extent evaluations performed with SWE-bench suffer from such plausible but incorrect patches. This paper presents an in-depth empirical study of the correctness of plausible patches generated by three state-of-the-art issue-solving tools evaluated on SWE-bench Verified. We extensively test and inspect generated patches, and compare them against human-written ground truth patches. The core of our methodology is a novel technique PatchDiff for differential patch testing, which automatically exposes behavioral discrepancies between two patches. Our findings reveal critical weaknesses in SWE-bench's patch validation mechanism, which causes 7.8% of all patches to count as correct while failing the developer-written test suite. Moreover, our novel automated technique reveals that even more (29.6%) plausible patches induce different behavior than the ground truth patches. These behavioral differences are often due to similar, but divergent implementations (46.8%) and due to generated patches that adapt more behavior than the ground truth patches (27.3%). Our manual inspection shows that 28.6% of behaviorally divergent patches are certainly incorrect. Combined, the different weaknesses lead to an inflation of reported resolution rates by 6.2 absolute percent points. Our findings are a call to arms for more robust and reliable evaluation of issue-solving tools. We envision our automated differential patch testing technique to be useful for this purpose.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 19, 2025

Out of Distribution, Out of Luck: How Well Can LLMs Trained on Vulnerability Datasets Detect Top 25 CWE Weaknesses?

Automated vulnerability detection research has made substantial progress, yet its real-world impact remains limited. Prior work found that current vulnerability datasets suffer from issues including label inaccuracy rates of 20%-71%, extensive duplication, and poor coverage of critical Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE). These issues create a significant generalization gap where models achieve misleading In-Distribution (ID) accuracies (testing on splits from the same dataset) by exploiting spurious correlations rather than learning true vulnerability patterns. To address these limitations, we present a three-part solution. First, we introduce BenchVul, which is a manually curated and balanced test dataset covering the MITRE Top 25 Most Dangerous CWEs, to enable fair model evaluation. Second, we construct a high-quality training dataset, TitanVul, comprising 38,548 functions by aggregating seven public sources and applying deduplication and validation using a novel multi-agent LLM pipeline. Third, we propose a Realistic Vulnerability Generation (RVG) pipeline, which synthesizes context-aware vulnerability examples for underrepresented but critical CWE types through simulated development workflows. Our evaluation reveals that In-Distribution (ID) performance does not reliably predict Out-of-Distribution (OOD) performance on BenchVul. For example, a model trained on BigVul achieves the highest 0.703 ID accuracy but fails on BenchVul's real-world samples (0.493 OOD accuracy). Conversely, a model trained on our TitanVul achieves the highest OOD performance on both the real-world (0.881) and synthesized (0.785) portions of BenchVul, improving upon the next-best performing dataset by 5.3% and 11.8% respectively, despite a modest ID score (0.590). Augmenting TitanVul with our RVG further boosts this leading OOD performance, improving accuracy on real-world data by 5.8% (to 0.932).

  • 19 authors
·
Jul 29, 2025

ONEBench to Test Them All: Sample-Level Benchmarking Over Open-Ended Capabilities

Traditional fixed test sets fall short in evaluating open-ended capabilities of foundation models. To address this, we propose ONEBench(OpeN-Ended Benchmarking), a new testing paradigm that consolidates individual evaluation datasets into a unified, ever-expanding sample pool. ONEBench allows users to generate custom, open-ended evaluation benchmarks from this pool, corresponding to specific capabilities of interest. By aggregating samples across test sets, ONEBench enables the assessment of diverse capabilities beyond those covered by the original test sets, while mitigating overfitting and dataset bias. Most importantly, it frames model evaluation as a collective process of selecting and aggregating sample-level tests. The shift from task-specific benchmarks to ONEBench introduces two challenges: (1)heterogeneity and (2)incompleteness. Heterogeneity refers to the aggregation over diverse metrics, while incompleteness describes comparing models evaluated on different data subsets. To address these challenges, we explore algorithms to aggregate sparse measurements into reliable model scores. Our aggregation algorithm ensures identifiability(asymptotically recovering ground-truth scores) and rapid convergence, enabling accurate model ranking with less data. On homogenous datasets, we show our aggregation algorithm provides rankings that highly correlate with those produced by average scores. We also demonstrate robustness to ~95% of measurements missing, reducing evaluation cost by up to 20x with little-to-no change in model rankings. We introduce ONEBench-LLM for language models and ONEBench-LMM for vision-language models, unifying evaluations across these domains. Overall, we present a technique for open-ended evaluation, which can aggregate over incomplete, heterogeneous sample-level measurements to continually grow a benchmark alongside the rapidly developing foundation models.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 9, 2024 2

An Exploratory Study on Fine-Tuning Large Language Models for Secure Code Generation

AI-powered coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot and OpenAI ChatGPT have achieved notable success in automating code generation. However, these tools rely on pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) that are typically trained on human-written code sourced from open-source project hosting sites like GitHub, which often contains inherent security vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities may then be mirrored in the code generated by these LLMs, a critical risk revealed and highlighted by recent empirical studies. In this work, we present an exploratory study on whether fine-tuning pre-trained LLMs on datasets of vulnerability-fixing commits can promote secure code generation. We explored two parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques (LoRa and IA3) on two pre-trained LLMs for code generation. We crawled a fine-tuning dataset (14,622 C and C++ files) for secure code generation by collecting code fixes of confirmed vulnerabilities from open-source repositories. Our evaluation dataset comprises 52 vulnerability scenarios designed to cover the top most dangerous C and C++ Common Weakness Enumerations (CWEs). Each scenario is a prompt that may induce LLMs to generate vulnerable code. Our exploration reveals that fine-tuning LLMs can improve secure code generation by 6.4% in C language and 5.4% in C++ language. We further experimented with fine-tuning LLMs using different versions of the collected secure code dataset (block, function, and line). We found that fine-tuning with function-level and block-level datasets achieves the best secure code generation performance, compared to the alternatives (file-level and line-level).

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 16, 2024

The Semantic Trap: Do Fine-tuned LLMs Learn Vulnerability Root Cause or Just Functional Pattern?

LLMs demonstrate promising performance in software vulnerability detection after fine-tuning. However, it remains unclear whether these gains reflect a genuine understanding of vulnerability root causes or merely an exploitation of functional patterns. In this paper, we identify a critical failure mode termed the "semantic trap," where fine-tuned LLMs achieve high detection scores by associating certain functional domains with vulnerability likelihood rather than reasoning about the underlying security semantics. To systematically evaluate this phenomenon, we propose TrapEval, a comprehensive evaluation framework designed to disentangle vulnerability root cause from functional pattern. TrapEval introduces two complementary datasets derived from real-world open-source projects: V2N, which pairs vulnerable code with unrelated benign code, and V2P, which pairs vulnerable code with its corresponding patched version, forcing models to distinguish near-identical code that differs only in subtle security-critical logic. Using TrapEval, we fine-tune five representative state-of-the-art LLMs across three model families and evaluate them under cross-dataset testing, semantic-preserving perturbations, and varying degrees of semantic gap measured by CodeBLEU. Our empirical results reveal that, despite improvements in metrics, fine-tuned LLMs consistently struggle to distinguish vulnerable code from its patched counterpart, exhibit severe robustness degradation under minor semantic-preserving transformations, and rely heavily on functional-context shortcuts when the semantic gap is small. These findings provide strong evidence that current fine-tuning practices often fail to impart true vulnerability reasoning. Our findings serve as a wake-up call: high benchmark scores on traditional datasets may be illusory, masking the model's inability to understand the true causal logic of vulnerabilities.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 1

SecVulEval: Benchmarking LLMs for Real-World C/C++ Vulnerability Detection

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in software engineering tasks, but evaluating their effectiveness in vulnerability detection is challenging due to the lack of high-quality datasets. Most existing datasets are limited to function-level labels, ignoring finer-grained vulnerability patterns and crucial contextual information. Also, poor data quality such as mislabeling, inconsistent annotations, and duplicates can lead to inflated performance and weak generalization. Moreover, by including only the functions, these datasets miss broader program context, like data/control dependencies and interprocedural interactions, that are essential for accurately understanding real-world security flaws. Without this context, detection models are evaluated under unrealistic assumptions. To address these limitations, this paper introduces SecVulEval, a benchmark designed to support fine-grained evaluation of LLMs and other detection methods with rich contextual information. SecVulEval focuses on real-world C/C++ vulnerabilities at the statement level. This granularity enables more precise evaluation of a model's ability to localize vulnerabilities, beyond simple binary classification at the function level. By incorporating rich contextual information, SecVulEval sets a new standard for vulnerability detection benchmarks in realistic scenarios. This benchmark includes 25,440 function samples covering 5,867 unique CVEs in C/C++ projects from 1999 to 2024. We evaluated the SOTA LLMs with a multi-agent-based approach. The evaluation on our dataset shows that the models are still far from accurately predicting vulnerable statements in a given function. The best-performing Claude-3.7-Sonnet model achieves 23.83% F1-score for detecting vulnerable statements with correct reasoning. Finally, we analyze the LLM outputs and provide insights into their behavior in vulnerability detection for C/C++.

  • 5 authors
·
May 25, 2025

Can ChatGPT replace StackOverflow? A Study on Robustness and Reliability of Large Language Model Code Generation

Recently, the large language models (LLMs) have shown extraordinary ability in understanding natural language and generating programming code. It has been a common practice of software engineers to consult LLMs when encountering coding questions. Although efforts have been made to avoid syntax errors and align the code with the intended semantics, the reliability and robustness of the code generationfrom LLMs have not yet been thoroughly studied. The executable code is not equivalent to the reliable and robust code, especially in the context of real-world software development. The misuse of APIs in the generated code could lead to severe problem, such as resource leaks, program crashes. To make things worse, the users of LLM code generation services are actually the developers that are most vulnerable to these code that seems right -- They are always novice developers that are not familiar with the APIs that LLMs generate code for them. Therefore, they could hardly tell the misuse in the code generated by LLMs, which further facilitates the incorrect code applied in real-world software. Existing code evaluation benchmark and datasets focus on crafting small tasks such as programming questions in coding interviews, which however deviates from the problem that developers would ask LLM for real-world coding help. To fill the missing piece, in this work, we propose a dataset RobustAPI for evaluating the reliability and robustness of code generated by LLMs. We collect 1208 coding questions from StackOverflow on 24 representative Java APIs. We summarize thecommon misuse patterns of these APIs and evaluate them oncurrent popular LLMs. The evaluation results show that evenfor GPT-4, 62% of the generated code contains API misuses,which would cause unexpected consequences if the code isintroduced into real-world software.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 20, 2023

A Match Made in Heaven? AI-driven Matching of Vulnerabilities and Security Unit Tests

Software vulnerabilities are often detected via taint analysis, penetration testing, or fuzzing. They are also found via unit tests that exercise security-sensitive behavior with specific inputs, called vulnerability-witnessing tests. Generative AI models could help developers in writing them, but they require many examples to learn from, which are currently scarce. This paper introduces VuTeCo, an AI-driven framework for collecting examples of vulnerability-witnessing tests from Java repositories. VuTeCo carries out two tasks: (1) The "Finding" task to determine whether a unit test case is security-related, and (2) the "Matching" task to relate a test case to the vulnerability it witnesses. VuTeCo addresses the Finding task with UniXcoder, achieving an F0.5 score of 0.73 and a precision of 0.83 on a test set of unit tests from Vul4J. The Matching task is addressed using DeepSeek Coder, achieving an F0.5 score of 0.65 and a precision of 0.75 on a test set of pairs of unit tests and vulnerabilities from Vul4J. VuTeCo has been used in the wild on 427 Java projects and 1,238 vulnerabilities, obtaining 224 test cases confirmed to be security-related and 35 tests correctly matched to 29 vulnerabilities. The validated tests were collected in a new dataset called Test4Vul. VuTeCo lays the foundation for large-scale retrieval of vulnerability-witnessing tests, enabling future AI models to better understand and generate security unit tests.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 5, 2025

TestBench: Evaluating Class-Level Test Case Generation Capability of Large Language Models

Software testing is a crucial phase in the software life cycle, helping identify potential risks and reduce maintenance costs. With the advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), researchers have proposed an increasing number of LLM-based software testing techniques, particularly in the area of test case generation. Despite the growing interest, limited efforts have been made to thoroughly evaluate the actual capabilities of LLMs in this task. In this paper, we introduce TestBench, a benchmark for class-level LLM-based test case generation. We construct a dataset of 108 Java programs from 9 real-world, large-scale projects on GitHub, each representing a different thematic domain. We then design three distinct types of prompts based on context descriptions, including self-contained context, full context, and simple context. Besides, we propose a fine-grained evaluation framework that considers five aspects of test cases: syntactic correctness, compilation correctness, test correctness, code coverage rate, and defect detection rate. Furthermore, we propose a heuristic algorithm to repair erroneous test cases generated by LLMs. We evaluate CodeLlama-13b, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 on the TestBench, and our experimental results indicate that larger models demonstrate a greater ability to effectively utilize contextual information, thus generating higher-quality test cases. Smaller models may struggle with the noise introduced by the extensive information contained within the full context. However, when using the simplified version, namely the simple context, which is derived from the full context via abstract syntax tree analysis, the performance of these models improves significantly. Our analysis highlights the current progress and pinpoints future directions to further enhance the effectiveness of models by handling contextual information for test case generation.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 26, 2024

UTFix: Change Aware Unit Test Repairing using LLM

Software updates, including bug repair and feature additions, are frequent in modern applications but they often leave test suites outdated, resulting in undetected bugs and increased chances of system failures. A recent study by Meta revealed that 14%-22% of software failures stem from outdated tests that fail to reflect changes in the codebase. This highlights the need to keep tests in sync with code changes to ensure software reliability. In this paper, we present UTFix, a novel approach for repairing unit tests when their corresponding focal methods undergo changes. UTFix addresses two critical issues: assertion failure and reduced code coverage caused by changes in the focal method. Our approach leverages language models to repair unit tests by providing contextual information such as static code slices, dynamic code slices, and failure messages. We evaluate UTFix on our generated synthetic benchmarks (Tool-Bench), and real-world benchmarks. Tool- Bench includes diverse changes from popular open-source Python GitHub projects, where UTFix successfully repaired 89.2% of assertion failures and achieved 100% code coverage for 96 tests out of 369 tests. On the real-world benchmarks, UTFix repairs 60% of assertion failures while achieving 100% code coverage for 19 out of 30 unit tests. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study focused on unit test in evolving Python projects. Our contributions include the development of UTFix, the creation of Tool-Bench and real-world benchmarks, and the demonstration of the effectiveness of LLM-based methods in addressing unit test failures due to software evolution.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 19, 2025

D2A: A Dataset Built for AI-Based Vulnerability Detection Methods Using Differential Analysis

Static analysis tools are widely used for vulnerability detection as they understand programs with complex behavior and millions of lines of code. Despite their popularity, static analysis tools are known to generate an excess of false positives. The recent ability of Machine Learning models to understand programming languages opens new possibilities when applied to static analysis. However, existing datasets to train models for vulnerability identification suffer from multiple limitations such as limited bug context, limited size, and synthetic and unrealistic source code. We propose D2A, a differential analysis based approach to label issues reported by static analysis tools. The D2A dataset is built by analyzing version pairs from multiple open source projects. From each project, we select bug fixing commits and we run static analysis on the versions before and after such commits. If some issues detected in a before-commit version disappear in the corresponding after-commit version, they are very likely to be real bugs that got fixed by the commit. We use D2A to generate a large labeled dataset to train models for vulnerability identification. We show that the dataset can be used to build a classifier to identify possible false alarms among the issues reported by static analysis, hence helping developers prioritize and investigate potential true positives first.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 16, 2021

CVEfixes: Automated Collection of Vulnerabilities and Their Fixes from Open-Source Software

Data-driven research on the automated discovery and repair of security vulnerabilities in source code requires comprehensive datasets of real-life vulnerable code and their fixes. To assist in such research, we propose a method to automatically collect and curate a comprehensive vulnerability dataset from Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) records in the public National Vulnerability Database (NVD). We implement our approach in a fully automated dataset collection tool and share an initial release of the resulting vulnerability dataset named CVEfixes. The CVEfixes collection tool automatically fetches all available CVE records from the NVD, gathers the vulnerable code and corresponding fixes from associated open-source repositories, and organizes the collected information in a relational database. Moreover, the dataset is enriched with meta-data such as programming language, and detailed code and security metrics at five levels of abstraction. The collection can easily be repeated to keep up-to-date with newly discovered or patched vulnerabilities. The initial release of CVEfixes spans all published CVEs up to 9 June 2021, covering 5365 CVE records for 1754 open-source projects that were addressed in a total of 5495 vulnerability fixing commits. CVEfixes supports various types of data-driven software security research, such as vulnerability prediction, vulnerability classification, vulnerability severity prediction, analysis of vulnerability-related code changes, and automated vulnerability repair.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 19, 2021

A Repository-Level Dataset For Detecting, Classifying and Repairing Software Vulnerabilities

Open-Source Software (OSS) vulnerabilities bring great challenges to the software security and pose potential risks to our society. Enormous efforts have been devoted into automated vulnerability detection, among which deep learning (DL)-based approaches have proven to be the most effective. However, the current labeled data present the following limitations: (1) Tangled Patches: Developers may submit code changes unrelated to vulnerability fixes within patches, leading to tangled patches. (2) Lacking Inter-procedural Vulnerabilities: The existing vulnerability datasets typically contain function-level and file-level vulnerabilities, ignoring the relations between functions, thus rendering the approaches unable to detect the inter-procedural vulnerabilities. (3) Outdated Patches: The existing datasets usually contain outdated patches, which may bias the model during training. To address the above limitations, in this paper, we propose an automated data collection framework and construct the first repository-level high-quality vulnerability dataset named ReposVul. The proposed framework mainly contains three modules: (1) A vulnerability untangling module, aiming at distinguishing vulnerability-fixing related code changes from tangled patches, in which the Large Language Models (LLMs) and static analysis tools are jointly employed. (2) A multi-granularity dependency extraction module, aiming at capturing the inter-procedural call relationships of vulnerabilities, in which we construct multiple-granularity information for each vulnerability patch, including repository-level, file-level, function-level, and line-level. (3) A trace-based filtering module, aiming at filtering the outdated patches, which leverages the file path trace-based filter and commit time trace-based filter to construct an up-to-date dataset.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 23, 2024

Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multi-Language Software Vulnerability Detection

Recent advancements in generative AI have led to the widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) in software engineering, addressing numerous long-standing challenges. However, a comprehensive study examining the capabilities of LLMs in software vulnerability detection (SVD), a crucial aspect of software security, is currently lacking. Existing research primarily focuses on evaluating LLMs using C/C++ datasets. It typically explores only one or two strategies among prompt engineering, instruction tuning, and sequence classification fine-tuning for open-source LLMs. Consequently, there is a significant knowledge gap regarding the effectiveness of diverse LLMs in detecting vulnerabilities across various programming languages. To address this knowledge gap, we present a comprehensive empirical study evaluating the performance of LLMs on the SVD task. We have compiled a comprehensive dataset comprising 8,260 vulnerable functions in Python, 7,505 in Java, and 28,983 in JavaScript. We assess five open-source LLMs using multiple approaches, including prompt engineering, instruction tuning, and sequence classification fine-tuning. These LLMs are benchmarked against five fine-tuned small language models and two open-source static application security testing tools. Furthermore, we explore two avenues to improve LLM performance on SVD: a) Data perspective: Retraining models using downsampled balanced datasets. b) Model perspective: Investigating ensemble learning methods that combine predictions from multiple LLMs. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that SVD remains a challenging task for LLMs. This study provides a thorough understanding of the role of LLMs in SVD and offers practical insights for future advancements in leveraging generative AI to enhance software security practices.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 3, 2025 2

AutoBaxBuilder: Bootstrapping Code Security Benchmarking

As LLMs see wide adoption in software engineering, the reliable assessment of the correctness and security of LLM-generated code is crucial. Notably, prior work has demonstrated that security is often overlooked, exposing that LLMs are prone to generating code with security vulnerabilities. These insights were enabled by specialized benchmarks, crafted through significant manual effort by security experts. However, relying on manually-crafted benchmarks is insufficient in the long term, because benchmarks (i) naturally end up contaminating training data, (ii) must extend to new tasks to provide a more complete picture, and (iii) must increase in difficulty to challenge more capable LLMs. In this work, we address these challenges and present AutoBaxBuilder, a framework that generates tasks and tests for code security benchmarking from scratch. We introduce a robust pipeline with fine-grained plausibility checks, leveraging the code understanding capabilities of LLMs to construct functionality tests and end-to-end security-probing exploits. To confirm the quality of the generated benchmark, we conduct both a qualitative analysis and perform quantitative experiments, comparing it against tasks constructed by human experts. We use AutoBaxBuilder to construct entirely new tasks and release them to the public as AutoBaxBench, together with a thorough evaluation of the security capabilities of LLMs on these tasks. We find that a new task can be generated in under 2 hours, costing less than USD 10.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 24, 2025

How Many Code and Test Cases Are Enough? Evaluating Test Cases Generation from a Binary-Matrix Perspective

Evaluating test cases automatically generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) is a critical yet challenging task. Existing benchmarks often evaluate the exclusion ratio on large, unstructured collections of wrong codes, suffering from high computational costs and score inflation. Furthermore, they inadvertently reward generators that detect common, trivial bugs, while failing to penalize their inability to identify rare yet critical faults. In this work, we connect two fundamental questions: (1) What is the minimal set of wrong codes sufficient to represent the entire error space? and (2) What is the minimal set of test cases needed to distinguish them? We introduce a novel framework that formalizes benchmark construction as finding an optimal diagnostic basis in a binary code-test matrix, where rows represent wrong codes and columns represent test case results. The rank of this matrix specifies the minimal number of independent error patterns (wrong codes) and provides a tight upper bound on the number of test cases required for complete fault coverage. Our objective is to identify a basis of size equal to the matrix rank that maximizes internal diversity. To tackle this NP-hard problem, we propose WrongSelect, an efficient approximation algorithm to select maximally diverse wrong codes. Applying this framework to millions of competitive programming submissions, we construct TC-Bench, a compact, diverse, and inflation-resistant benchmark. Extensive experiments show that even the most advanced test case generation methods achieve only ~60% exclusion rates on TC-Bench, exposing a significant gap in their diagnostic power and highlighting substantial room for future improvement. Our dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Luoberta/TC-Bench and our code is at: https://github.com/Luowaterbi/TC-Bench.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 9, 2025

SecureCode v2.0: A Production-Grade Dataset for Training Security-Aware Code Generation Models

AI assistants produce vulnerable code in 45% of security-relevant scenarios, introducing flaws into production systems at scale. Yet existing secure coding datasets fall short. They lack incident grounding, don't provide the scale modern training requires, and miss the operational security context developers need for production deployments. We present SecureCode v2.0, a production-grade dataset of 1,215 security-focused coding examples that passed structural validation and expert security review. Every example ties to actual documented security incidents with CVE references, provides vulnerable and secure implementations, demonstrates concrete attacks, and includes defense-in-depth operational guidance. The dataset covers 11 vulnerability categories (complete OWASP Top 10:2025 plus AI/ML Security Threats) across 11 languages (Python, JavaScript, Java, Go, PHP, C#, TypeScript, Ruby, Rust, Kotlin, and YAML for infrastructure-as-code). Our quality assurance framework ensures complete incident grounding. Each example includes SIEM integration strategies, infrastructure hardening recommendations (Docker, AppArmor, WAF configurations), and testing approaches using language-appropriate frameworks. The dataset uses a 4-turn conversational structure mirroring actual developer-AI interactions, escalating from basic implementations to advanced security considerations and defense-in-depth guidance. Our contributions: (1) 1,215 rigorously validated examples split into 989 training, 122 validation, and 104 test sets, (2) an automated validation framework ensuring dataset consistency, (3) a 4-turn conversational structure capturing realistic security workflows, (4) comprehensive operational security guidance with SIEM integration strategies, (5) complete language-specific implementation fidelity, and (6) open-source release of data, validation tools, and benchmarking protocols.

  • 1 authors
·
Dec 20, 2025 1

Deep Learning based Vulnerability Detection: Are We There Yet?

Automated detection of software vulnerabilities is a fundamental problem in software security. Existing program analysis techniques either suffer from high false positives or false negatives. Recent progress in Deep Learning (DL) has resulted in a surge of interest in applying DL for automated vulnerability detection. Several recent studies have demonstrated promising results achieving an accuracy of up to 95% at detecting vulnerabilities. In this paper, we ask, "how well do the state-of-the-art DL-based techniques perform in a real-world vulnerability prediction scenario?". To our surprise, we find that their performance drops by more than 50%. A systematic investigation of what causes such precipitous performance drop reveals that existing DL-based vulnerability prediction approaches suffer from challenges with the training data (e.g., data duplication, unrealistic distribution of vulnerable classes, etc.) and with the model choices (e.g., simple token-based models). As a result, these approaches often do not learn features related to the actual cause of the vulnerabilities. Instead, they learn unrelated artifacts from the dataset (e.g., specific variable/function names, etc.). Leveraging these empirical findings, we demonstrate how a more principled approach to data collection and model design, based on realistic settings of vulnerability prediction, can lead to better solutions. The resulting tools perform significantly better than the studied baseline: up to 33.57% boost in precision and 128.38% boost in recall compared to the best performing model in the literature. Overall, this paper elucidates existing DL-based vulnerability prediction systems' potential issues and draws a roadmap for future DL-based vulnerability prediction research. In that spirit, we make available all the artifacts supporting our results: https://git.io/Jf6IA.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 3, 2020

CWEval: Outcome-driven Evaluation on Functionality and Security of LLM Code Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly aided developers by generating or assisting in code writing, enhancing productivity across various tasks. While identifying incorrect code is often straightforward, detecting vulnerabilities in functionally correct code is more challenging, especially for developers with limited security knowledge, which poses considerable security risks of using LLM-generated code and underscores the need for robust evaluation benchmarks that assess both functional correctness and security. Current benchmarks like CyberSecEval and SecurityEval attempt to solve it but are hindered by unclear and impractical specifications, failing to assess both functionality and security accurately. To tackle these deficiencies, we introduce CWEval, a novel outcome-driven evaluation framework designed to enhance the evaluation of secure code generation by LLMs. This framework not only assesses code functionality but also its security simultaneously with high-quality task specifications and outcome-driven test oracles which provides high accuracy. Coupled with CWEval-bench, a multilingual, security-critical coding benchmark, CWEval provides a rigorous empirical security evaluation on LLM-generated code, overcoming previous benchmarks' shortcomings. Through our evaluations, CWEval reveals a notable portion of functional but insecure code produced by LLMs, and shows a serious inaccuracy of previous evaluations, ultimately contributing significantly to the field of secure code generation. We open-source our artifact at: https://github.com/Co1lin/CWEval .

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 14, 2025

The Foundation Cracks: A Comprehensive Study on Bugs and Testing Practices in LLM Libraries

Large Language Model (LLM) libraries have emerged as the foundational infrastructure powering today's AI revolution, serving as the backbone for LLM deployment, inference optimization, fine-tuning, and production serving across diverse applications. Despite their critical role in the LLM ecosystem, these libraries face frequent quality issues and bugs that threaten the reliability of AI systems built upon them. To address this knowledge gap, we present the first comprehensive empirical investigation into bug characteristics and testing practices in modern LLM libraries. We examine 313 bug-fixing commits extracted across two widely-adopted LLM libraries: HuggingFace Transformers and vLLM.Through rigorous manual analysis, we establish comprehensive taxonomies categorizing bug symptoms into 5 types and root causes into 14 distinct categories.Our primary discovery shows that API misuse has emerged as the predominant root cause (32.17%-48.19%), representing a notable transition from algorithm-focused defects in conventional deep learning frameworks toward interface-oriented problems. Additionally, we examine 7,748 test functions to identify 7 distinct test oracle categories employed in current testing approaches, with predefined expected outputs (such as specific tensors and text strings) being the most common strategy. Our assessment of existing testing effectiveness demonstrates that the majority of bugs escape detection due to inadequate test cases (41.73%), lack of test drivers (32.37%), and weak test oracles (25.90%). Drawing from these findings, we offer some recommendations for enhancing LLM library quality assurance.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 13, 2025

AsserT5: Test Assertion Generation Using a Fine-Tuned Code Language Model

Writing good software tests can be challenging, therefore approaches that support developers are desirable. While generating complete tests automatically is such an approach commonly proposed in research, developers may already have specific test scenarios in mind and thus just require help in selecting the most suitable test assertions for these scenarios. This can be done using deep learning models to predict assertions for given test code. Prior research on assertion generation trained these models specifically for the task, raising the question how much the use of larger models pre-trained on code that have emerged since then can improve their performance. In particular, while abstracting identifiers has been shown to improve specifically trained models, it remains unclear whether this also generalises to models pre-trained on non-abstracted code. Finally, even though prior work demonstrated high accuracy it remains unclear how this translates into the effectiveness of the assertions at their intended application -- finding faults. To shed light on these open questions, in this paper we propose AsserT5, a new model based on the pre-trained CodeT5 model, and use this to empirically study assertion generation. We find that the abstraction and the inclusion of the focal method are useful also for a fine-tuned pre-trained model, resulting in test assertions that match the ground truth assertions precisely in up to 59.5\% of cases, more than twice as precise as prior models. However, evaluation on real bugs from the Defects4J dataset shows that out of 138 bugs detectable with assertions in real-world projects, AsserT5 was only able to suggest fault-finding assertions for 33, indicating the need for further improvements.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 4, 2025

CleanVul: Automatic Function-Level Vulnerability Detection in Code Commits Using LLM Heuristics

Accurate identification of software vulnerabilities is crucial for system integrity. Vulnerability datasets, often derived from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) or directly from GitHub, are essential for training machine learning models to detect these security flaws. However, these datasets frequently suffer from significant noise, typically 40% to 75%, due primarily to the automatic and indiscriminate labeling of all changes in vulnerability-fixing commits (VFCs) as vulnerability-related. This misclassification occurs because not all changes in a commit aimed at fixing vulnerabilities pertain to security threats; many are routine updates like bug fixes or test improvements. This paper introduces the first methodology that uses the Large Language Model (LLM) with a heuristic enhancement to automatically identify vulnerability-fixing changes from VFCs, achieving an F1-score of 0.82. VulSifter was applied to a large-scale study, where we conducted a crawl of 127,063 repositories on GitHub, resulting in the acquisition of 5,352,105 commits. VulSifter involves utilizing an LLM to comprehend code semantics and contextual information, while applying heuristics to filter out unrelated changes. We then developed CleanVul, a high-quality dataset comprising 8,198 functions using our LLM heuristic enhancement approach, demonstrating Correctness (90.6%) comparable to established datasets such as SVEN and PrimeVul. To evaluate the CleanVul dataset, we conducted experiments focusing on fine-tuning various LLMs on CleanVul and other high-quality datasets. Evaluation results reveal that LLMs fine-tuned on CleanVul not only exhibit enhanced accuracy but also superior generalization capabilities compared to those trained on uncleaned datasets. Specifically, models trained on CleanVul and tested on PrimeVul achieve accuracy higher than those trained and tested exclusively on PrimeVul.

  • 16 authors
·
Nov 26, 2024

Foundation Model-oriented Robustness: Robust Image Model Evaluation with Pretrained Models

Machine learning has demonstrated remarkable performance over finite datasets, yet whether the scores over the fixed benchmarks can sufficiently indicate the model's performance in the real world is still in discussion. In reality, an ideal robust model will probably behave similarly to the oracle (e.g., the human users), thus a good evaluation protocol is probably to evaluate the models' behaviors in comparison to the oracle. In this paper, we introduce a new robustness measurement that directly measures the image classification model's performance compared with a surrogate oracle (i.e., a foundation model). Besides, we design a simple method that can accomplish the evaluation beyond the scope of the benchmarks. Our method extends the image datasets with new samples that are sufficiently perturbed to be distinct from the ones in the original sets, but are still bounded within the same image-label structure the original test image represents, constrained by a foundation model pretrained with a large amount of samples. As a result, our new method will offer us a new way to evaluate the models' robustness performance, free of limitations of fixed benchmarks or constrained perturbations, although scoped by the power of the oracle. In addition to the evaluation results, we also leverage our generated data to understand the behaviors of the model and our new evaluation strategies.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 21, 2023

Expect the Unexpected: FailSafe Long Context QA for Finance

We propose a new long-context financial benchmark, FailSafeQA, designed to test the robustness and context-awareness of LLMs against six variations in human-interface interactions in LLM-based query-answer systems within finance. We concentrate on two case studies: Query Failure and Context Failure. In the Query Failure scenario, we perturb the original query to vary in domain expertise, completeness, and linguistic accuracy. In the Context Failure case, we simulate the uploads of degraded, irrelevant, and empty documents. We employ the LLM-as-a-Judge methodology with Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct and use fine-grained rating criteria to define and calculate Robustness, Context Grounding, and Compliance scores for 24 off-the-shelf models. The results suggest that although some models excel at mitigating input perturbations, they must balance robust answering with the ability to refrain from hallucinating. Notably, Palmyra-Fin-128k-Instruct, recognized as the most compliant model, maintained strong baseline performance but encountered challenges in sustaining robust predictions in 17% of test cases. On the other hand, the most robust model, OpenAI o3-mini, fabricated information in 41% of tested cases. The results demonstrate that even high-performing models have significant room for improvement and highlight the role of FailSafeQA as a tool for developing LLMs optimized for dependability in financial applications. The dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Writer/FailSafeQA

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 10, 2025 4

REACCEPT: Automated Co-evolution of Production and Test Code Based on Dynamic Validation and Large Language Models

Synchronizing production and test code, known as PT co-evolution, is critical for software quality in the software development lifecycle. Existing methods for automatic PT co-evolution either utilize predefined heuristic rules or rely on simple application of machine learning techniques. Due to the limitations of underlying techniques, existing methods either only partially automate PT co-evolution (e.g., only automate obsolete test code identification) or result in low accuracy. In this paper, we propose REACCEPT, a novel approach that leverages large language models and dynamic validation to fully automate PT co-evolution (i.e., capable of both identifying and updating obsolete test cases). REACCEPT relies on experience-based prompt template generation, dynamic validation, and retrieval-augmented generation techniques to accomplish automated PT co-evolution. To evaluate REACCEPT's effectiveness, we extensive experiments with a dataset of 537 Java projects and compared REACCEPT's performance with several state-of-the-art methods. Results show that REACCEPT achieved an update accuracy of 60.16% on correctly identified obsolete test code, surpassing the state-of-the-art technique CEPROT by 90%. This confirms that REACCEPT can effectively assist developers in maintaining test code, improving overall software quality and reducing maintenance effort.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 17, 2024

WebTestBench: Evaluating Computer-Use Agents towards End-to-End Automated Web Testing

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has catalyzed a paradigm shift in programming, giving rise to "vibe coding", where users can build complete projects and even control computers using natural language instructions. This paradigm has driven automated webpage development, but it introduces a new requirement about how to automatically verify whether the web functionalities are reliably implemented. Existing works struggle to adapt, relying on static visual similarity or predefined checklists that constrain their utility in open-ended environments. Furthermore, they overlook a vital aspect of software quality, namely latent logical constraints. To address these gaps, we introduce WebTestBench, a benchmark for evaluating end-to-end automated web testing. WebTestBench encompasses comprehensive dimensions across diverse web application categories. We decompose the testing process into two cascaded sub-tasks, checklist generation and defect detection, and propose WebTester, a baseline framework for this task. Evaluating popular LLMs with WebTester reveals severe challenges, including insufficient test completeness, detection bottlenecks, and long-horizon interaction unreliability. These findings expose a substantial gap between current computer-use agent capabilities and industrial-grade deployment demands. We hope that WebTestBench provides valuable insights and guidance for advancing end-to-end automated web testing. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/friedrichor/WebTestBench.

  • 13 authors
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Mar 26

Robustness Gym: Unifying the NLP Evaluation Landscape

Despite impressive performance on standard benchmarks, deep neural networks are often brittle when deployed in real-world systems. Consequently, recent research has focused on testing the robustness of such models, resulting in a diverse set of evaluation methodologies ranging from adversarial attacks to rule-based data transformations. In this work, we identify challenges with evaluating NLP systems and propose a solution in the form of Robustness Gym (RG), a simple and extensible evaluation toolkit that unifies 4 standard evaluation paradigms: subpopulations, transformations, evaluation sets, and adversarial attacks. By providing a common platform for evaluation, Robustness Gym enables practitioners to compare results from all 4 evaluation paradigms with just a few clicks, and to easily develop and share novel evaluation methods using a built-in set of abstractions. To validate Robustness Gym's utility to practitioners, we conducted a real-world case study with a sentiment-modeling team, revealing performance degradations of 18%+. To verify that Robustness Gym can aid novel research analyses, we perform the first study of state-of-the-art commercial and academic named entity linking (NEL) systems, as well as a fine-grained analysis of state-of-the-art summarization models. For NEL, commercial systems struggle to link rare entities and lag their academic counterparts by 10%+, while state-of-the-art summarization models struggle on examples that require abstraction and distillation, degrading by 9%+. Robustness Gym can be found at https://robustnessgym.com/

  • 9 authors
·
Jan 12, 2021

Automated Code-centric Software Vulnerability Assessment: How Far Are We? An Empirical Study in C/C++

Background: The C and C++ languages hold significant importance in Software Engineering research because of their widespread use in practice. Numerous studies have utilized Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) techniques to detect software vulnerabilities (SVs) in the source code written in these languages. However, the application of these techniques in function-level SV assessment has been largely unexplored. SV assessment is increasingly crucial as it provides detailed information on the exploitability, impacts, and severity of security defects, thereby aiding in their prioritization and remediation. Aims: We conduct the first empirical study to investigate and compare the performance of ML and DL models, many of which have been used for SV detection, for function-level SV assessment in C/C++. Method: Using 9,993 vulnerable C/C++ functions, we evaluated the performance of six multi-class ML models and five multi-class DL models for the SV assessment at the function level based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). We further explore multi-task learning, which can leverage common vulnerable code to predict all SV assessment outputs simultaneously in a single model, and compare the effectiveness and efficiency of this model type with those of the original multi-class models. Results: We show that ML has matching or even better performance compared to the multi-class DL models for function-level SV assessment with significantly less training time. Employing multi-task learning allows the DL models to perform significantly better, with an average of 8-22% increase in Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC). Conclusions: We distill the practices of using data-driven techniques for function-level SV assessment in C/C++, including the use of multi-task DL to balance efficiency and effectiveness. This can establish a strong foundation for future work in this area.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 24, 2024

SWE-Bench+: Enhanced Coding Benchmark for LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) in Software Engineering (SE) can offer assistance for coding. To facilitate a rigorous evaluation of LLMs in practical coding contexts, Carlos et al. introduced the SWE-bench dataset, which comprises 2,294 real-world GitHub issues and their corresponding pull requests, collected from 12 widely used Python repositories. Several impressive LLM-based toolkits recently are developed and evaluated on this dataset. However, a systematic evaluation of the quality of SWE-bench remains missing. In this paper, we addressed this gap by presenting an empirical analysis of the SWE-bench dataset. We conducted a manual screening of instances where SWEAgent + GPT-4 successfully resolved issues by comparing the model-generated patches with the actual pull requests. SWE-Agent+GPT-4 was at the top of SWE-bench leaderboard during the time of our study. Our analysis reveals some critical issues with the SWE-bench dataset: 1) 32.67% of the successful patches involve cheating as the solutions were directly provided in the issue report or the comments. We refer to as solution leakage problem. 2) 31.08% of the passed patches are suspicious patches due to weak test cases, i.e., the tests were not adequate to verify the correctness of a patch. When we filtered out these problematic issues, the resolution rate of SWE-Agent+GPT-4 dropped from 12.47% to 3.97%. We also observed that the same data quality issues also exist in the two variants of SWE-bench, i.e., SWE-bench Lite and SWE-Bench Verified. In addition, over 94% of the issues were created before LLM's knowledge cutoff dates, posing potential data leakage issues.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 9, 2024

OSS-Bench: Benchmark Generator for Coding LLMs

In light of the rapid adoption of AI coding assistants, LLM-assisted development has become increasingly prevalent, creating an urgent need for robust evaluation of generated code quality. Existing benchmarks often require extensive manual effort to create static datasets, rely on indirect or insufficiently challenging tasks, depend on non-scalable ground truth, or neglect critical low-level security evaluations, particularly memory-safety issues. In this work, we introduce OSS-Bench, a benchmark generator that automatically constructs large-scale, live evaluation tasks from real-world open-source software. OSS-Bench replaces functions with LLM-generated code and evaluates them using three natural metrics: compilability, functional correctness, and memory safety, leveraging robust signals like compilation failures, test-suite violations, and sanitizer alerts as ground truth. In our evaluation, the benchmark, instantiated as OSS-Bench(php) and OSS-Bench(sql), profiles 17 diverse LLMs, revealing insights such as intra-family behavioral patterns and inconsistencies between model size and performance. Our results demonstrate that OSS-Bench mitigates overfitting by leveraging the evolving complexity of OSS and highlights LLMs' limited understanding of low-level code security via extended fuzzing experiments. Overall, OSS-Bench offers a practical and scalable framework for benchmarking the real-world coding capabilities of LLMs.

  • 3 authors
·
May 18, 2025

Revisiting Pre-trained Language Models for Vulnerability Detection

The rapid advancement of pre-trained language models (PLMs) has demonstrated promising results for various code-related tasks. However, their effectiveness in detecting real-world vulnerabilities remains a critical challenge. % for the security community. While existing empirical studies evaluate PLMs for vulnerability detection (VD), their inadequate consideration in data preparation, evaluation setups, and experimental settings undermines the accuracy and comprehensiveness of evaluations. This paper introduces RevisitVD, an extensive evaluation of 17 PLMs spanning smaller code-specific PLMs and large-scale PLMs using newly constructed datasets. Specifically, we compare the performance of PLMs under both fine-tuning and prompt engineering, assess their effectiveness and generalizability across various training and testing settings, and analyze their robustness against code normalization, abstraction, and semantic-preserving transformations. Our findings reveal that, for VD tasks, PLMs incorporating pre-training tasks designed to capture the syntactic and semantic patterns of code outperform both general-purpose PLMs and those solely pre-trained or fine-tuned on large code corpora. However, these models face notable challenges in real-world scenarios, such as difficulties in detecting vulnerabilities with complex dependencies, handling perturbations introduced by code normalization and abstraction, and identifying semantic-preserving vulnerable code transformations. Also, the truncation caused by the limited context windows of PLMs can lead to a non-negligible amount of labeling errors. This study underscores the importance of thorough evaluations of model performance in practical scenarios and outlines future directions to help enhance the effectiveness of PLMs for realistic VD applications.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 22, 2025

From Coverage to Causes: Data-Centric Fuzzing for JavaScript Engines

Context: Exhaustive fuzzing of modern JavaScript engines is infeasible due to the vast number of program states and execution paths. Coverage-guided fuzzers waste effort on low-risk inputs, often ignoring vulnerability-triggering ones that do not increase coverage. Existing heuristics proposed to mitigate this require expert effort, are brittle, and hard to adapt. Objective: We propose a data-centric, LLM-boosted alternative that learns from historical vulnerabilities to automatically identify minimal static (code) and dynamic (runtime) features for detecting high-risk inputs. Method: Guided by historical V8 bugs, iterative prompting generated 115 static and 49 dynamic features, with the latter requiring only five trace flags, minimizing instrumentation cost. After feature selection, 41 features remained to train an XGBoost model to predict high-risk inputs during fuzzing. Results: Combining static and dynamic features yields over 85% precision and under 1% false alarms. Only 25% of these features are needed for comparable performance, showing that most of the search space is irrelevant. Conclusion: This work introduces feature-guided fuzzing, an automated data-driven approach that replaces coverage with data-directed inference, guiding fuzzers toward high-risk states for faster, targeted, and reproducible vulnerability discovery. To support open science, all scripts and data are available at https://github.com/KKGanguly/DataCentricFuzzJS .

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 19, 2025

LLM-based Vulnerability Detection at Project Scale: An Empirical Study

In this paper, we present the first comprehensive empirical study of specialized LLM-based detectors and compare them with traditional static analyzers at the project scale. Specifically, our study evaluates five latest and representative LLM-based methods and two traditional tools using: 1) an in-house benchmark of 222 known real-world vulnerabilities (C/C++ and Java) to assess detection capability, and 2) 24 active open-source projects, where we manually inspected 385 warnings to assess their practical usability and underlying root causes of failures. Our evaluation yields three key findings: First, while LLM-based detectors exhibit low recall on the in-house benchmark, they still uncover more unique vulnerabilities than traditional tools. Second, in open-source projects, both LLM-based and traditional tools generate substantial warnings but suffer from very high false discovery rates, hindering practical use. Our manual analysis further reveals shallow interprocedural reasoning and misidentified source/sink pairs as primary failure causes, with LLM-based tools exhibiting additional unique failures. Finally, LLM-based methods incurs substantial computational costs-hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of tokens and multi-hour to multi-day runtimes. Overall, our findings underscore critical limitations in the robustness, reliability, and scalability of current LLM-based detectors. We ultimately summarize a set of implications for future research toward more effective and practical project-scale vulnerability detection.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 26

CodeContests-O: Powering LLMs via Feedback-Driven Iterative Test Case Generation

The rise of reasoning models necessitates large-scale verifiable data, for which programming tasks serve as an ideal source. However, while competitive programming platforms provide abundant problems and solutions, high-quality test cases for verification remain scarce. Existing approaches attempt to synthesize test cases using Large Language Models (LLMs), but rely solely on the model's intrinsic generation capabilities without external feedback, frequently resulting in insufficiently diverse cases. To address this limitation, we propose a Feedback-Driven Iterative Framework for comprehensive test case construction. Specifically, our method leverages the LLM to generate initial test cases, executes them against known correct and incorrect solutions, and utilizes the failed results as feedback to guide the LLM in refining the test cases toward high fidelity and discriminability. We then apply this method to the CodeContests dataset to construct an optimized high-quality derivative, CodeContests-O. Evaluating against the entire pool of solutions (1.1 times 10^7 in total), our dataset achieves an average True Positive Rate (TPR) of 89.37% and True Negative Rate (TNR) of 90.89%, significantly outperforming the CodeContests and CodeContests+ by margins of 4.32% and 9.37%, respectively. Furthermore, fine-tuning the Qwen2.5-7B model on CodeContests-O results in a 9.52% improvement on LiveCodeBench (Pass@1). Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and the quality of CodeContests-O. To support reproducibility and facilitate future research, we release the https://github.com/cai-jianfeng/CodeContests-O{code} and https://huggingface.co/datasets/caijanfeng/CodeContests-O{dataset}.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 20

Small Edits, Big Consequences: Telling Good from Bad Robustness in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) now write code in settings where misreading a single word can break safety or cost money, yet we still expect them to overlook stray typos. To probe where useful robustness ends and harmful insensitivity begins, we compile 50 LeetCode problems and craft three minimal prompt perturbations that should vary in importance: (i) progressive underspecification deleting 10 % of words per step; (ii) lexical flip swapping a pivotal quantifier ("max" to "min"); and (iii) jargon inflation replacing a common noun with an obscure technical synonym. Six frontier models, including three "reasoning-tuned" versions, solve each mutated prompt, and their Python outputs are checked against the original test suites to reveal whether they reused the baseline solution or adapted. Among 11 853 generations we observe a sharp double asymmetry. Models remain correct in 85 % of cases even after 90 % of the prompt is missing, showing over-robustness to underspecification, yet only 54 % react to a single quantifier flip that reverses the task, with reasoning-tuned variants even less sensitive than their bases. Jargon edits lie in between, passing through 56 %. Current LLMs thus blur the line between harmless noise and meaning - changing edits, often treating both as ignorable. Masking salient anchors such as function names can force re - evaluation. We advocate evaluation and training protocols that reward differential sensitivity: stay steady under benign noise but adapt - or refuse - when semantics truly change.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 14, 2025

A Vulnerability Code Intent Summary Dataset

In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), the code summarization technique boosts a lot, along with the emergence of many new significant works. However, the potential of code summarization in the Computer Security Area still remains explored. Can we generate a code summary of a code snippet for its security intention? Thus, this work proposes an innovative large-scale multi-perspective Code Intent Summary Dataset named BADS , aiming to increase the understanding of a given code snippet and reduce the risk in the code developing process. The procedure of establishing a dataset can be divided into four steps: First, we collect samples of codes with known vulnerabilities as well as code generated by AI from multiple sources. Second, we do the data clean and format unification, then do the data combination. Third, we utilize the LLM to automatically Annotate the code snippet. Last, We do the human evaluation to double-check. The dataset contains X code examples which cover Y categories of vulnerability. Our data are from Z open-source projects and CVE entries, and compared to existing work, our dataset not only contains original code but also code function summary and security intent summary, providing context information for research in code security analysis. All information is in CSV format. The contributions of this paper are four-fold: the establishment of a high-quality, multi-perspective Code Intent Summary Dataset; an innovative method in data collection and processing; A new multi-perspective code analysis framework that promotes cross-disciplinary research in the fields of software engineering and cybersecurity; improving the practicality and scalability of the research outcomes by considering the code length limitations in real-world applications. Our dataset and related tools have been publicly released on GitHub.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 10, 2025

Robustness Over Time: Understanding Adversarial Examples' Effectiveness on Longitudinal Versions of Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to significant improvements in many tasks across various domains, such as code interpretation, response generation, and ambiguity handling. These LLMs, however, when upgrading, primarily prioritize enhancing user experience while neglecting security, privacy, and safety implications. Consequently, unintended vulnerabilities or biases can be introduced. Previous studies have predominantly focused on specific versions of the models and disregard the potential emergence of new attack vectors targeting the updated versions. Through the lens of adversarial examples within the in-context learning framework, this longitudinal study addresses this gap by conducting a comprehensive assessment of the robustness of successive versions of LLMs, vis-\`a-vis GPT-3.5. We conduct extensive experiments to analyze and understand the impact of the robustness in two distinct learning categories: zero-shot learning and few-shot learning. Our findings indicate that, in comparison to earlier versions of LLMs, the updated versions do not exhibit the anticipated level of robustness against adversarial attacks. In addition, our study emphasizes the increased effectiveness of synergized adversarial queries in most zero-shot learning and few-shot learning cases. We hope that our study can lead to a more refined assessment of the robustness of LLMs over time and provide valuable insights of these models for both developers and users.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 15, 2023

Towards Trustworthy Machine Learning in Production: An Overview of the Robustness in MLOps Approach

Artificial intelligence (AI), and especially its sub-field of Machine Learning (ML), are impacting the daily lives of everyone with their ubiquitous applications. In recent years, AI researchers and practitioners have introduced principles and guidelines to build systems that make reliable and trustworthy decisions. From a practical perspective, conventional ML systems process historical data to extract the features that are consequently used to train ML models that perform the desired task. However, in practice, a fundamental challenge arises when the system needs to be operationalized and deployed to evolve and operate in real-life environments continuously. To address this challenge, Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) have emerged as a potential recipe for standardizing ML solutions in deployment. Although MLOps demonstrated great success in streamlining ML processes, thoroughly defining the specifications of robust MLOps approaches remains of great interest to researchers and practitioners. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the trustworthiness property of MLOps systems. Specifically, we highlight technical practices to achieve robust MLOps systems. In addition, we survey the existing research approaches that address the robustness aspects of ML systems in production. We also review the tools and software available to build MLOps systems and summarize their support to handle the robustness aspects. Finally, we present the open challenges and propose possible future directions and opportunities within this emerging field. The aim of this paper is to provide researchers and practitioners working on practical AI applications with a comprehensive view to adopt robust ML solutions in production environments.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 28, 2024

LLM Swiss Round: Aggregating Multi-Benchmark Performance via Competitive Swiss-System Dynamics

The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) and diverse specialized benchmarks necessitates a shift from fragmented, task-specific metrics to a holistic, competitive ranking system that effectively aggregates performance across multiple ability dimensions. Primarily using static scoring, current evaluation methods are fundamentally limited. They struggle to determine the proper mix ratio across diverse benchmarks, and critically, they fail to capture a model's dynamic competitive fitness or its vulnerability when confronted with sequential, high-stakes tasks. To address this, we introduce the novel Competitive Swiss-System Dynamics (CSD) framework. CSD simulates a multi-round, sequential contest where models are dynamically paired across a curated sequence of benchmarks based on their accumulated win-loss record. And Monte Carlo Simulation (N=100,000 iterations) is used to approximate the statistically robust Expected Win Score (E[S_m]), which eliminates the noise of random pairing and early-round luck. Furthermore, we implement a Failure Sensitivity Analysis by parameterizing the per-round elimination quantity (T_k), which allows us to profile models based on their risk appetite--distinguishing between robust generalists and aggressive specialists. We demonstrate that CSD provides a more nuanced and context-aware ranking than traditional aggregate scoring and static pairwise models, representing a vital step towards risk-informed, next-generation LLM evaluation.

ByteDance-Seed ByteDance Seed
·
Dec 24, 2025 2

Code Structure-Aware through Line-level Semantic Learning for Code Vulnerability Detection

Different from the flow semantics of natural languages, programming languages are inherently rigid in structure and grammar. Existing fine-tuning methodologies for code vulnerability detection generally treat code as long text sequences, stripping away structural elements such as newlines ('/n') and whitespace. However, this approach inadvertently results in the loss of crucial structural information, diminishing the distinct characteristics of code and impairing the accuracy of vulnerability detection. To address these challenges, we propose a novel network architecture method based on pre-trained code models, which incorporates structural information awareness. We propose an enhanced code text processing workflow that retains structural elements prior to modeling. This refinement allows the model to retain and exploit line-level structural information and semantic information during the modeling process. Furthermore, we introduce a new network architecture, the Code Structure-Aware Network through Line-level Semantic Learning (CSLS), which integrates three key components: global vulnerability awareness, line-structural awareness, and sensitive-line awareness. We have conducted comprehensive experiments using vulnerability detection datasets from real-world projects. Extensive experiments were conducted on vulnerability detection datasets derived from real-world projects. The results demonstrate that our new code pre-processing flow significantly improves existing baselines (e.g., a 3\% accuracy improvement on the Devign dataset when applied to popular models such as CoderBert and UniXcoder). The proposed network architecture also demonstrates superior accuracy in detecting vulnerabilities, surpassing newly established benchmarks. These findings underscore the importance of structural information in enhancing the efficacy of code vulnerability detection models.

  • 6 authors
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Jul 26, 2024

FORGE: An LLM-driven Framework for Large-Scale Smart Contract Vulnerability Dataset Construction

High-quality smart contract vulnerability datasets are critical for evaluating security tools and advancing smart contract security research. Two major limitations of current manual dataset construction are (1) labor-intensive and error-prone annotation processes limiting the scale, quality, and evolution of the dataset, and (2) absence of standardized classification rules results in inconsistent vulnerability categories and labeling results across different datasets. To address these limitations, we present FORGE, the first automated approach for constructing smart contract vulnerability datasets. FORGE leverages an LLM-driven pipeline to extract high-quality vulnerabilities from real-world audit reports and classify them according to the CWE, the most widely recognized classification in software security. FORGE employs a divide-and-conquer strategy to extract structured and self-contained vulnerability information from these reports. Additionally, it uses a tree-of-thoughts technique to classify the vulnerability information into the hierarchical CWE classification. To evaluate FORGE's effectiveness, we run FORGE on 6,454 real-world audit reports and generate a dataset comprising 81,390 solidity files and 27,497 vulnerability findings across 296 CWE categories. Manual assessment of the dataset demonstrates high extraction precision and classification consistency with human experts (precision of 95.6% and inter-rater agreement k-α of 0.87). We further validate the practicality of our dataset by benchmarking 13 existing security tools on our dataset. The results reveal the significant limitations in current detection capabilities. Furthermore, by analyzing the severity-frequency distribution patterns through a unified CWE perspective in our dataset, we highlight inconsistency between current smart contract research focus and priorities identified from real-world vulnerabilities...

  • 10 authors
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Jun 23, 2025 1

SecReEvalBench: A Multi-turned Security Resilience Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models

The increasing deployment of large language models in security-sensitive domains necessitates rigorous evaluation of their resilience against adversarial prompt-based attacks. While previous benchmarks have focused on security evaluations with limited and predefined attack domains, such as cybersecurity attacks, they often lack a comprehensive assessment of intent-driven adversarial prompts and the consideration of real-life scenario-based multi-turn attacks. To address this gap, we present SecReEvalBench, the Security Resilience Evaluation Benchmark, which defines four novel metrics: Prompt Attack Resilience Score, Prompt Attack Refusal Logic Score, Chain-Based Attack Resilience Score and Chain-Based Attack Rejection Time Score. Moreover, SecReEvalBench employs six questioning sequences for model assessment: one-off attack, successive attack, successive reverse attack, alternative attack, sequential ascending attack with escalating threat levels and sequential descending attack with diminishing threat levels. In addition, we introduce a dataset customized for the benchmark, which incorporates both neutral and malicious prompts, categorised across seven security domains and sixteen attack techniques. In applying this benchmark, we systematically evaluate five state-of-the-art open-weighted large language models, Llama 3.1, Gemma 2, Mistral v0.3, DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen 3. Our findings offer critical insights into the strengths and weaknesses of modern large language models in defending against evolving adversarial threats. The SecReEvalBench dataset is publicly available at https://kaggle.com/datasets/5a7ee22cf9dab6c93b55a73f630f6c9b42e936351b0ae98fbae6ddaca7fe248d, which provides a groundwork for advancing research in large language model security.

  • 2 authors
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May 12, 2025

Helping LLMs Improve Code Generation Using Feedback from Testing and Static Analysis

Large Language Models (LLMs) are one of the most promising developments in the field of artificial intelligence, and the software engineering community has readily noticed their potential role in the software development life-cycle. Developers routinely ask LLMs to generate code snippets, increasing productivity but also potentially introducing ownership, privacy, correctness, and security issues. Previous work highlighted how code generated by mainstream commercial LLMs is often not safe, containing vulnerabilities, bugs, and code smells. In this paper, we present a framework that leverages testing and static analysis to assess the quality, and guide the self-improvement, of code generated by general-purpose, open-source LLMs. First, we ask LLMs to generate C code to solve a number of programming tasks. Then we employ ground-truth tests to assess the (in)correctness of the generated code, and a static analysis tool to detect potential safety vulnerabilities. Next, we assess the models ability to evaluate the generated code, by asking them to detect errors and vulnerabilities. Finally, we test the models ability to fix the generated code, providing the reports produced during the static analysis and incorrectness evaluation phases as feedback. Our results show that models often produce incorrect code, and that the generated code can include safety issues. Moreover, they perform very poorly at detecting either issue. On the positive side, we observe a substantial ability to fix flawed code when provided with information about failed tests or potential vulnerabilities, indicating a promising avenue for improving the safety of LLM-based code generation tools.

  • 6 authors
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Dec 19, 2024

UniTSyn: A Large-Scale Dataset Capable of Enhancing the Prowess of Large Language Models for Program Testing

The remarkable capability of large language models (LLMs) in generating high-quality code has drawn increasing attention in the software testing community. However, existing code LLMs often demonstrate unsatisfactory capabilities in generating accurate and complete tests since they were trained on code snippets collected without differentiating between code for testing purposes and other code. In this paper, we present a large-scale dataset UniTSyn, which is capable of enhancing the prowess of LLMs for Unit Test Synthesis. Associating tests with the tested functions is crucial for LLMs to infer the expected behavior and the logic paths to be verified. By leveraging Language Server Protocol, UniTSyn achieves the challenging goal of collecting focal-test pairs without per-project execution setups or per-language heuristics that tend to be fragile and difficult to scale. It contains 2.7 million focal-test pairs across five mainstream programming languages, making it possible to be utilized for enhancing the test generation ability of LLMs. The details of UniTSyn can be found in Table 1. Our experiments demonstrate that, by building an autoregressive model based on UniTSyn, we can achieve significant benefits in learning and understanding unit test representations, resulting in improved generation accuracy and code coverage across all evaluated programming languages. Code and data will be publicly available.

  • 6 authors
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Feb 4, 2024

Methods2Test: A dataset of focal methods mapped to test cases

Unit testing is an essential part of the software development process, which helps to identify issues with source code in early stages of development and prevent regressions. Machine learning has emerged as viable approach to help software developers generate automated unit tests. However, generating reliable unit test cases that are semantically correct and capable of catching software bugs or unintended behavior via machine learning requires large, metadata-rich, datasets. In this paper we present Methods2Test: A dataset of focal methods mapped to test cases: a large, supervised dataset of test cases mapped to corresponding methods under test (i.e., focal methods). This dataset contains 780,944 pairs of JUnit tests and focal methods, extracted from a total of 91,385 Java open source projects hosted on GitHub with licenses permitting re-distribution. The main challenge behind the creation of the Methods2Test was to establish a reliable mapping between a test case and the relevant focal method. To this aim, we designed a set of heuristics, based on developers' best practices in software testing, which identify the likely focal method for a given test case. To facilitate further analysis, we store a rich set of metadata for each method-test pair in JSON-formatted files. Additionally, we extract textual corpus from the dataset at different context levels, which we provide both in raw and tokenized forms, in order to enable researchers to train and evaluate machine learning models for Automated Test Generation. Methods2Test is publicly available at: https://github.com/microsoft/methods2test

  • 4 authors
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Mar 23, 2022

Towards Reliable Neural Specifications

Having reliable specifications is an unavoidable challenge in achieving verifiable correctness, robustness, and interpretability of AI systems. Existing specifications for neural networks are in the paradigm of data as specification. That is, the local neighborhood centering around a reference input is considered to be correct (or robust). While existing specifications contribute to verifying adversarial robustness, a significant problem in many research domains, our empirical study shows that those verified regions are somewhat tight, and thus fail to allow verification of test set inputs, making them impractical for some real-world applications. To this end, we propose a new family of specifications called neural representation as specification, which uses the intrinsic information of neural networks - neural activation patterns (NAPs), rather than input data to specify the correctness and/or robustness of neural network predictions. We present a simple statistical approach to mining neural activation patterns. To show the effectiveness of discovered NAPs, we formally verify several important properties, such as various types of misclassifications will never happen for a given NAP, and there is no ambiguity between different NAPs. We show that by using NAP, we can verify a significant region of the input space, while still recalling 84% of the data on MNIST. Moreover, we can push the verifiable bound to 10 times larger on the CIFAR10 benchmark. Thus, we argue that NAPs can potentially be used as a more reliable and extensible specification for neural network verification.

  • 6 authors
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Oct 28, 2022

Model Context Protocol (MCP) at First Glance: Studying the Security and Maintainability of MCP Servers

Although Foundation Models (FMs), such as GPT-4, are increasingly used in domains like finance and software engineering, reliance on textual interfaces limits these models' real-world interaction. To address this, FM providers introduced tool calling-triggering a proliferation of frameworks with distinct tool interfaces. In late 2024, Anthropic introduced the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to standardize this tool ecosystem, which has become the de facto standard with over eight million weekly SDK downloads. Despite its adoption, MCP's AI-driven, non-deterministic control flow introduces new risks to sustainability, security, and maintainability, warranting closer examination. Towards this end, we present the first large-scale empirical study of MCP servers. Using state-of-the-art health metrics and a hybrid analysis pipeline, combining a general-purpose static analysis tool with an MCP-specific scanner, we evaluate 1,899 open-source MCP servers to assess their health, security, and maintainability. Despite MCP servers demonstrating strong health metrics, we identify eight distinct vulnerabilities - only three overlapping with traditional software vulnerabilities. Additionally, 7.2% of servers contain general vulnerabilities and 5.5% exhibit MCP-specific tool poisoning. Regarding maintainability, while 66% exhibit code smells, 14.4% contain nine bug patterns overlapping with traditional open-source software projects. These findings highlight the need for MCP-specific vulnerability detection techniques while reaffirming the value of traditional analysis and refactoring practices.

  • 6 authors
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Jun 16, 2025

Specification-Guided Vulnerability Detection with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in code understanding tasks. However, they demonstrate limited performance in vulnerability detection and struggle to distinguish vulnerable code from patched code. We argue that LLMs lack understanding of security specifications -- the expectations about how code should behave to remain safe. When code behavior differs from these expectations, it becomes a potential vulnerability. However, such knowledge is rarely explicit in training data, leaving models unable to reason about security flaws. We propose VulInstruct, a specification-guided approach that systematically extracts security specifications from historical vulnerabilities to detect new ones. VulInstruct constructs a specification knowledge base from two perspectives: (i) General specifications from high-quality patches across projects, capturing fundamental safe behaviors; and (ii) Domain-specific specifications from repeated violations in particular repositories relevant to the target code. VulInstruct retrieves relevant past cases and specifications, enabling LLMs to reason about expected safe behaviors rather than relying on surface patterns. We evaluate VulInstruct under strict criteria requiring both correct predictions and valid reasoning. On PrimeVul, VulInstruct achieves 45.0% F1-score (32.7% improvement) and 37.7% recall (50.8% improvement) compared to baselines, while uniquely detecting 24.3% of vulnerabilities -- 2.4x more than any baseline. In pair-wise evaluation, VulInstruct achieves 32.3% relative improvement. VulInstruct also discovered a previously unknown high-severity vulnerability (CVE-2025-56538) in production code, demonstrating practical value for real-world vulnerability discovery. All code and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/zhuhaopku/VulInstruct-temp.

  • 10 authors
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Nov 5, 2025

TeleAI-Safety: A comprehensive LLM jailbreaking benchmark towards attacks, defenses, and evaluations

While the deployment of large language models (LLMs) in high-value industries continues to expand, the systematic assessment of their safety against jailbreak and prompt-based attacks remains insufficient. Existing safety evaluation benchmarks and frameworks are often limited by an imbalanced integration of core components (attack, defense, and evaluation methods) and an isolation between flexible evaluation frameworks and standardized benchmarking capabilities. These limitations hinder reliable cross-study comparisons and create unnecessary overhead for comprehensive risk assessment. To address these gaps, we present TeleAI-Safety, a modular and reproducible framework coupled with a systematic benchmark for rigorous LLM safety evaluation. Our framework integrates a broad collection of 19 attack methods (including one self-developed method), 29 defense methods, and 19 evaluation methods (including one self-developed method). With a curated attack corpus of 342 samples spanning 12 distinct risk categories, the TeleAI-Safety benchmark conducts extensive evaluations across 14 target models. The results reveal systematic vulnerabilities and model-specific failure cases, highlighting critical trade-offs between safety and utility, and identifying potential defense patterns for future optimization. In practical scenarios, TeleAI-Safety can be flexibly adjusted with customized attack, defense, and evaluation combinations to meet specific demands. We release our complete code and evaluation results to facilitate reproducible research and establish unified safety baselines.

  • 13 authors
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Dec 5, 2025

FeatBench: Evaluating Coding Agents on Feature Implementation for Vibe Coding

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has given rise to a novel software development paradigm known as "vibe coding," where users interact with coding agents through high-level natural language. However, existing evaluation benchmarks for code generation inadequately assess an agent's vibe coding capabilities. Existing benchmarks are misaligned, as they either require code-level specifications or focus narrowly on issue-solving, neglecting the critical scenario of feature implementation within the vibe coding paradiam. To address this gap, we propose FeatBench, a novel benchmark for vibe coding that focuses on feature implementation. Our benchmark is distinguished by several key features: 1. Pure Natural Language Prompts. Task inputs consist solely of abstract natural language descriptions, devoid of any code or structural hints. 2. A Rigorous & Evolving Data Collection Process. FeatBench is built on a multi-level filtering pipeline to ensure quality and a fully automated pipeline to evolve the benchmark, mitigating data contamination. 3. Comprehensive Test Cases. Each task includes Fail-to-Pass (F2P) and Pass-to-Pass (P2P) tests to verify correctness and prevent regressions. 4. Diverse Application Domains. The benchmark includes repositories from diverse domains to ensure it reflects real-world scenarios. We evaluate two state-of-the-art agent frameworks with four leading LLMs on FeatBench. Our evaluation reveals that feature implementation within the vibe coding paradigm is a significant challenge, with the highest success rate of only 29.94%. Our analysis also reveals a tendency for "aggressive implementation," a strategy that paradoxically leads to both critical failures and superior software design. We release FeatBench, our automated collection pipeline, and all experimental results to facilitate further community research.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 26, 2025

Learning to Quantize Vulnerability Patterns and Match to Locate Statement-Level Vulnerabilities

Deep learning (DL) models have become increasingly popular in identifying software vulnerabilities. Prior studies found that vulnerabilities across different vulnerable programs may exhibit similar vulnerable scopes, implicitly forming discernible vulnerability patterns that can be learned by DL models through supervised training. However, vulnerable scopes still manifest in various spatial locations and formats within a program, posing challenges for models to accurately identify vulnerable statements. Despite this challenge, state-of-the-art vulnerability detection approaches fail to exploit the vulnerability patterns that arise in vulnerable programs. To take full advantage of vulnerability patterns and unleash the ability of DL models, we propose a novel vulnerability-matching approach in this paper, drawing inspiration from program analysis tools that locate vulnerabilities based on pre-defined patterns. Specifically, a vulnerability codebook is learned, which consists of quantized vectors representing various vulnerability patterns. During inference, the codebook is iterated to match all learned patterns and predict the presence of potential vulnerabilities within a given program. Our approach was extensively evaluated on a real-world dataset comprising more than 188,000 C/C++ functions. The evaluation results show that our approach achieves an F1-score of 94% (6% higher than the previous best) and 82% (19% higher than the previous best) for function and statement-level vulnerability identification, respectively. These substantial enhancements highlight the effectiveness of our approach to identifying vulnerabilities. The training code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/optimatch/optimatch.

  • 5 authors
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May 26, 2023