A six-role multi-agent repair system wrote correct patches for 92.3 percent of real-world C/C++ vulnerabilities
AspireAI community · arXiv preprint
When a vulnerability's root cause sits far from the crash site, a repair agent that trusts the sanitizer report will patch the symptom. DeepAVR splits the job across six roles - fault localization, patch generation, compile validation, security validation, functionality validation and patch review - and routes feedback between them, with two mechanisms aimed at the hidden-root-cause case: patch-conditioned re-localization, which treats the execution result of an intermediate patch as a diagnostic signal, and a review stage designed to catch symptom-level fixes.
On the real-world C/C++ vulnerability repair dataset VulnLoc, the system produced correct patches for 92.3% of vulnerabilities, and on SAN2VULN it repaired vulnerabilities it had not seen in training. The paper walks through CVE-2018-8964, a heap-use-after-free, where the agent's first patch location was wrong and the developer fix was a bounds check in decompile.c.
Caveat: author-reported results on one repair dataset plus a generalization set, and the C/C++ scope is narrower than the title suggests.
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