The DOI matches its Crossref record; 5 of the 5 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
LineVul: a transformer-based line-level vulnerability prediction
Abstract
Software vulnerabilities are prevalent in software systems, causing a variety of problems including deadlock, information loss, or system failures. Thus, early predictions of software vulnerabilities are critically important in safety-critical software systems. Various ML/DL-based approaches have been proposed to predict vulnerabilities at the file/function/method level. Recently, IVDetect (a graph-based neural network) is proposed to predict vulnerabilities at the function level. Yet, the IVDetect approach is still inaccurate and coarse-grained. In this paper, we propose LineVul, a Transformer-based line-level vulnerability prediction approach in order to address several limitations of the state-of-the-art IVDetect approach. Through an empirical evaluation of a large-scale real-world dataset with 188k+ C/C++ functions, we show that LineVul achieves (1) 160%-379% higher F1-measure for function-level predictions; (2) 12%-25% higher Top-10 Accuracy for line-level predictions; and (3) 29%-53% less [email protected]%Recall than the baseline approaches, highlighting the significant advancement of LineVul towards more accurate and more cost-effective line-level vulnerability predictions. Our additional analysis also shows that our LineVul is also very accurate (75%-100%) for predicting vulnerable functions affected by the Top-25 most dangerous CWEs, highlighting the potential impact of our LineVul in real-world usage scenarios.
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Transformers: State-of-the-Art Natural Language Processing
Wolf, T., Debut, L., Sanh, V., Chaumond, J., Delangue, C., Moi, A., Cistac, P., Rault, T., Louf, R., Funtowicz, M., et al. (2020) · Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations · doi:10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-demos.6 · Cited by 8,741
Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps
Simonyan, K., Vedaldi, A., & Zisserman, A. (2013) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1312.6034 · Cited by 5,370
CodeBERT: A Pre-Trained Model for Programming and Natural Languages
Feng, Z., Guo, D., Tang, D., Duan, N., Feng, X., Gong, M., Shou, L., Qin, B., Liu, T., Jiang, D., et al. (2020) · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020 · doi:10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.139 · Cited by 2,824
Big code != big vocabulary: open-vocabulary models for source code
Karampatsis, R.-M., Babii, H., Robbes, R., Sutton, C., & Janes, A. (2020) · Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/3377811.3380342 · Cited by 182
Predicting Defective Lines Using a Model-Agnostic Technique
Wattanakriengkrai, S., Thongtanunam, P., Tantithamthavorn, C., Hata, H., & Matsumoto, K. (2022) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2020.3023177 · Cited by 137
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Cited by
Generative AI in cybersecurity: A comprehensive review of LLM applications and vulnerabilities
Ferrag, M. A., Alwahedi, F., Battah, A., Cherif, B., Mechri, A., Tihanyi, N., Bisztray, T., & Debbah, M. (2025) · Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems · doi:10.1016/j.iotcps.2025.01.001 · Cited by 148
A survey on large language models for software engineering
Zhang, Q., Fang, C., Xie, Y., Zhang, Y., Yu, S., Sun, W., Yang, Y., & Chen, Z. (2026) · Science China Information Sciences · doi:10.1007/s11432-025-4670-0 · Cited by 124
Understanding the Effectiveness of Large Language Models in Detecting Security Vulnerabilities
Khare, A., Dutta, S., Li, Z., Solko-Breslin, A., Alur, R., & Naik, M. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2311.16169 · Cited by 64
Human-In-the-Loop Software Development Agents
Takerngsaksiri, W., Pasuksmit, J., Thongtanunam, P., Tantithamthavorn, C., Zhang, R., Jiang, F., Li, J., Cook, E., Chen, K., & Wu, M. (2024) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2411.12924 · Cited by 24
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Metadata
- Authors
- Fu, M., & Tantithamthavorn, C.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2022-05-23
- Pages
- 608-620
- OpenAlex
- W4312436517
- Cited by
- 384
- References
- 5
- FWCI
- 62.61
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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