Your Instructions Are Not Always Helpful: Assessing the Efficacy of Instruction Fine-tuning for Software Vulnerability Detection

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Yusuf, Imam Nur Bani, Jiang, Lingxiao
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866916091640414208
author Yusuf, Imam Nur Bani
Jiang, Lingxiao
author_facet Yusuf, Imam Nur Bani
Jiang, Lingxiao
contents Software, while beneficial, poses potential cybersecurity risks due to inherent vulnerabilities. Detecting these vulnerabilities is crucial, and deep learning has shown promise as an effective tool for this task due to its ability to perform well without extensive feature engineering. However, a challenge in deploying deep learning for vulnerability detection is the limited availability of training data. Recent research highlights the deep learning efficacy in diverse tasks. This success is attributed to instruction fine-tuning, a technique that remains under-explored in the context of vulnerability detection. This paper investigates the capability of models, specifically a recent language model, to generalize beyond the programming languages used in their training data. It also examines the role of natural language instructions in enhancing this generalization. Our study evaluates the model performance on a real-world dataset to predict vulnerable code. We present key insights and lessons learned, contributing to understanding the deep learning application in software vulnerability detection.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_07466
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Your Instructions Are Not Always Helpful: Assessing the Efficacy of Instruction Fine-tuning for Software Vulnerability Detection
Yusuf, Imam Nur Bani
Jiang, Lingxiao
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Software, while beneficial, poses potential cybersecurity risks due to inherent vulnerabilities. Detecting these vulnerabilities is crucial, and deep learning has shown promise as an effective tool for this task due to its ability to perform well without extensive feature engineering. However, a challenge in deploying deep learning for vulnerability detection is the limited availability of training data. Recent research highlights the deep learning efficacy in diverse tasks. This success is attributed to instruction fine-tuning, a technique that remains under-explored in the context of vulnerability detection. This paper investigates the capability of models, specifically a recent language model, to generalize beyond the programming languages used in their training data. It also examines the role of natural language instructions in enhancing this generalization. Our study evaluates the model performance on a real-world dataset to predict vulnerable code. We present key insights and lessons learned, contributing to understanding the deep learning application in software vulnerability detection.
title Your Instructions Are Not Always Helpful: Assessing the Efficacy of Instruction Fine-tuning for Software Vulnerability Detection
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.07466