VulnAgent-X: A Layered Agentic Framework for Repository-Level Vulnerability Detection

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13384v1
• Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2026 04:57:17 GMT
• Title: VulnAgent-X: A Layered Agentic Framework for Repository-Level Vulnerability Detection
• Abstract summary: VulnAgentX is a layered agentic framework integrat- ing lightweight risk screening, bounded context expansion, specialised analysis agents, selective dynamic verification, and evidence fusion into a unified pipeline.<n>Treating vulnerabil- ity detection as a staged, evidence-driven auditing process improves de- tection quality, reduces false positives, and produces interpretable re-sults for repository-level software security analysis.
• Score: 9.51089779418208
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Software vulnerability detection is critical in software en- gineering as security flaws arise from complex interactions across code structure, repository context, and runtime conditions. Existing meth- ods are limited by local code views, one-shot prediction, and insuffi- cient validation, reducing reliability in realistic repository-level settings. This study proposes VulnAgentX, a layered agentic framework integrat- ing lightweight risk screening, bounded context expansion, specialised analysis agents, selective dynamic verification, and evidence fusion into a unified pipeline. Experiments on function-level and just-in-time vul- nerability benchmarks show VulnAgent-X outperforms static baselines, encoder-based models, and simpler agentic variants, with better local- isation and balanced performance-cost trade-offs. Treating vulnerabil- ity detection as a staged, evidence-driven auditing process improves de- tection quality, reduces false positives, and produces interpretable re- sults for repository-level software security analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaolu-666113/Vlun-Agent-X.

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