Large Language Models (LLMs) are moving from code completion toward repository-scale agents that retrieve context, edit files, execute tools, and participate in security-sensitive workflows. The evidence for these systems, however, remains divided between software engineering evaluations centered on functional task completion and software security evaluations centered on vulnerability detection, secure generation, or exploit-oriented validation. This evidence-centered structured survey synthesizes representative work available through May 31, 2026 across software engineering tasks, software security tasks, adaptation mechanisms, artifact granularity, and evaluation design. In addition to a task taxonomy, we introduce an assurance framework that separates functional correctness, security, operational reliability, evidence provenance, and agent authority. The review shows that execution feedback and repository access can substantially improve engineering task completion, but do not by themselves establish security; conversely, static-analysis labels or vulnerability-classification scores rarely establish deployable correctness. We identify recurring validity threats--weak test oracles, duplicated and temporally leaked data, changing agent harnesses, proxy-only security checks, and under-reported budgets and human intervention--and derive a minimum reporting protocol for cross-study comparison. The resulting research agenda prioritizes jointly secure-and-functional benchmarks, repository-scale threat models, calibrated human oversight, longitudinal maintainability evidence, and reproducible agent evaluation. The central conclusion is that model capability should be judged as an assurance case supported by task-appropriate evidence, rather than by a single benchmark score.
Binary code representation learning is a fundamental problem in software security and reverse engineering. Existing methods mainly learn function-level embeddings that capture coarse-grained semantic relationships between binary functions, but they largely ignore fine-grained instruction-level correspondences. This limitation misses valuable supervision signals available from compiler debug information, which can support the learning of more accurate and interpretable binary code representations. We propose to leverage instruction alignment knowledge to further improve binary code representation learning. Our preliminary study reveals that models finetuned for function-level binary code similarity exhibit substantially better instruction alignment than their pre-trained model, suggesting a strong correlation between instruction alignment and function-level embedding quality. Motivated by this observation, we design a training approach that explicitly incorporates instruction alignment as an auxiliary training objective. Our experiments show that instruction alignment training improves retrieval accuracy and provides more discriminative signal for the model's similarity judgments.
Supriti Vijay, Aman Priyanshu, Didier Chapoteau +8cs.CR cs.AI
Vulnerability localization is a fundamental step in software security, requiring models to reason over large codebases and iteratively identify vulnerable implementations. We present Antares, a family of compact language models (350M, 1B, and 3B parameters) for agentic vulnerability localization. Based on IBM Granite base models, Antares is trained through a two-stage pipeline that combines supervised fine-tuning on cybersecurity reasoning and repository exploration data with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards over vulnerable repositories. Across extensive evaluations, Antares-3B approaches GPT-5.5 while outperforming open-weight models over 200x larger in size. The Antares family further enables fast, low-cost local inference, completing a full 500-task evaluation sweep in approximately 15 minutes on a single H100 GPU, corresponding to an amortized evaluation time of under 2 seconds and less than $0.002 per task.
Code-generation models can produce executable components, but compilation and functional tests do not establish compliance with least privilege, telemetry consent, provenance, privileged-write authority, lifecycle constraints, or bounded failure. We introduce EduPluginBench, an executable benchmark and staged admission method for generated plugins in governed software ecosystems. Across 1,440 activation-checked first-order mutants from 30 specifications, P0-P4 increased release-blocking-defect recall by 74.7 percentage points (specification-clustered 95% CI 73.4-75.8) over P0-P2, with no observed rejection among 120 clean references (95% Wilson upper bound 3.1%). A frozen transfer study of 600 unmodified generations from two current coding models found that 300/600 parsed, but none passed P0 or achieved P0-P4 conformance (95% upper bound 0.64%); downstream assurance estimands were undefined. An independently labelled Moodle study retained 16 vulnerable/fixed pairs; the frozen generic PHP detector found no vulnerable revisions. These negative transfer results prevent controlled contract consistency from being read as independent real-defect effectiveness. An earlier 540-generation diagnostic found that post-hoc bounded repair yielded 112 P0 passes, all nonconforming, with recall increasing from 13.4% to 100%. The artifact retains protocols, public-source provenance, raw generations, row-level decisions, audits, analysis code, and reproduction instructions.
Jesse Phillips, Tracy Hall, Paul Rayson +1cs.SE cs.CL
Neural Source Code Summarisation (NSCS) aims to generate natural language summaries of source code to improve developers' and maintainers' understanding of code. Source code summaries are vital during the maintenance phase of the Secure Software Development Lifecycle (SSDLC), as they improve maintainers' understanding of code and help reduce the number of bugs and vulnerabilities in a software system. However, summaries are often missing, incomplete, or outdated in many software systems. Solutions to this problem use small, task-specific Transformer models or code-aware Large Language Models (LLMs). Task-specific Transformer-generated summaries often score well across many natural language generation (NLG) metrics, but these metrics reward lexical overlap rather than summary quality. Conversely, the ability of LLMs to capture semantics and produce high-quality summaries presents an exciting solution to this problem. This is especially relevant given the increased availability of LLMs and improvements in workstation hardware in recent years, which mean that some LLMs can now be run on developers' workstations. However, because of their abstractive nature, LLM-generated code summaries often differ greatly from developer-written summaries in the words and phrases they use, resulting in low scores across NLG metrics. We show how combining these two methods, by using Transformer-generated summaries in prompt engineering, may enable LLMs to create better source code summaries and help software practitioners maintain secure systems. We prompt four LLMs using four different prompts, with a task-specific Transformer used to assist the LLMs within the prompts. We present "Transformer-Assisted LLM-Based Source Code Summarisation", a method through which we observe an improvement of 7.8% in BLEU-4 and 5%.
Varun Gadey, Zijie Liu, Alexandra Dmitrienkocs.CR cs.LG cs.SE
Automated vulnerability repair has emerged as a promising direction to mitigate the growing number of software vulnerabilities. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have further accelerated research in automated repair. However, existing frameworks remain largely restricted to memory-related vulnerabilities and locally repairable vulnerability settings, leaving generalization to unseen vulnerability types underexplored. Their evaluations are often limited to a single programming language, and largely rely on proprietary models. In this paper, we propose RAVEN, a scalable, efficient and autonomous framework that integrates an agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline with controlled iterative repair in a unified framework. The framework utilizes open-source LLMs in a fully locally deployable setting with limited GPU requirements, while building a multi-faceted retrieval pipeline to retrieve historically relevant vulnerability fixes and guide the patch generation. In addition, RAVEN introduces a dedicated Curator Agent that retrieves cross-file dependencies from the target repository, to fix complex vulnerabilities that cannot be addressed using local vulnerable code alone. We evaluate RAVEN on 160 real-world CVE vulnerabilities across diverse vulnerability types, two programming languages, unseen CWE categories, and out-of-distribution settings. RAVEN achieves an overall repair success rate of 83.13%, outperforming all existing state-of-the-art repair frameworks, while also demonstrating strong generalization capabilities and maintaining the repair cost negligible.
The advent of agentic vulnerability detection is already becoming a watershed moment for software security. Audits conducted entirely by autonomous LLM agents are uncovering critical vulnerabilities in fundamental software underpinning digital society. Many of these vulnerabilities remained masked for years, surfacing only now with AI agents. Yet the reasoning behind these discoveries remains alarmingly opaque and unvalidated. What assumptions did the agent make about a function's inputs when it deemed that function to be secure? Failures in reasoning and incorrect assumptions can lead to missed vulnerabilities and reduce trust in agentic analysis. We propose a security-specification-first paradigm that (1) exposes the agent's tacit assumptions explicitly as security specifications and (2) continuously refines those specifications via runtime falsification. We realize our approach in Code-Augur, a novel harness for agentic vulnerability detection. Given a codebase, Code-Augur analyzes each component of the system for vulnerable code. When it deems a component to be secure, it commits the local invariants behind that judgment as in-source assertions. In parallel, Code-Augur leverages a guided fuzzer to attempt to falsify those assumptions. When the fuzzer triggers an assertion, this either reveals a genuine vulnerability or a flawed specification to refine. In both cases, this process grounds the agent's understanding, aligning its view of code intent with how the code actually behaves. On real-world subjects, Code-Augur effectively leverages security specifications to detect more vulnerabilities than other state-of-the-art agents. Additionally, Code-Augur found 22 new vulnerabilities in key open-source projects. Compared to curated specialized models like Claude Mythos, Code-Augur offers effective agentic vulnerability detection built on widely available LLMs like Sonnet and DeepSeek.
Binary reversing is fundamental to software understanding, vulnerability discovery, malware investigation, and firmware auditing. However, it remains inherently challenging due to the irreversible loss of semantic information during compilation. Recent advances in machine learning, large language models (LLMs), and agentic AI systems have accelerated the adoption of AI-augmented binary reversing. Yet, the resulting body of work has become increasingly fragmented across reversing domains, artifact representations, learning approaches, and evaluation practices. This paper presents the first comprehensive systematization of knowledge on AI-augmented binary reversing. We analyze 144 research papers published since 2015, and organize them into 22 binary reversing domains according to the inference tasks. We further introduce a unified taxonomy spanning conventional and AI-augmented reversing pipelines. Our taxonomy connects traditional analysis techniques, binary-derived artifacts, representation strategies, learning paradigms, and downstream inference tasks, while clarifying the emerging roles of LLMs and agentic AI systems. By establishing a common vocabulary and structured framework, we provide a holistic view of the field's evolution over the past decade. Our study reveals common structures underlying seemingly disparate approaches, highlights persistent technical challenges and evaluation gaps, and identifies promising opportunities for future research. Collectively, these insights clarify the current state of the field and provide a foundation for the next generation of reliable and scalable AI-augmented binary reversing systems.