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Main Authors: Gao, Chaoyang, Chen, Xiang, Wang, Jiyu, Wang, Jibin, Yang, Guang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02840
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author Gao, Chaoyang
Chen, Xiang
Wang, Jiyu
Wang, Jibin
Yang, Guang
author_facet Gao, Chaoyang
Chen, Xiang
Wang, Jiyu
Wang, Jibin
Yang, Guang
contents The increasing complexity of software systems has led to a surge in cybersecurity vulnerabilities, necessitating efficient and scalable solutions for vulnerability assessment. However, the deployment of large pre-trained models in real-world scenarios is hindered by their substantial computational and storage demands. To address this challenge, we propose a novel resource-efficient framework that integrates knowledge distillation and particle swarm optimization to enable automated vulnerability assessment. Our framework employs a two-stage approach: First, particle swarm optimization is utilized to optimize the architecture of a compact student model, balancing computational efficiency and model capacity. Second, knowledge distillation is applied to transfer critical vulnerability assessment knowledge from a large teacher model to the optimized student model. This process significantly reduces the model size while maintaining high performance. Experimental results on an enhanced MegaVul dataset, comprising 12,071 CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) v3 annotated vulnerabilities, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our approach achieves a 99.4% reduction in model size while retaining 89.3% of the original model's accuracy. Furthermore, it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 1.7% in accuracy with 60% fewer parameters. The framework also reduces training time by 72.1% and architecture search time by 34.88% compared to traditional genetic algorithms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_02840
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Resource-Efficient Automatic Software Vulnerability Assessment via Knowledge Distillation and Particle Swarm Optimization
Gao, Chaoyang
Chen, Xiang
Wang, Jiyu
Wang, Jibin
Yang, Guang
Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
The increasing complexity of software systems has led to a surge in cybersecurity vulnerabilities, necessitating efficient and scalable solutions for vulnerability assessment. However, the deployment of large pre-trained models in real-world scenarios is hindered by their substantial computational and storage demands. To address this challenge, we propose a novel resource-efficient framework that integrates knowledge distillation and particle swarm optimization to enable automated vulnerability assessment. Our framework employs a two-stage approach: First, particle swarm optimization is utilized to optimize the architecture of a compact student model, balancing computational efficiency and model capacity. Second, knowledge distillation is applied to transfer critical vulnerability assessment knowledge from a large teacher model to the optimized student model. This process significantly reduces the model size while maintaining high performance. Experimental results on an enhanced MegaVul dataset, comprising 12,071 CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) v3 annotated vulnerabilities, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our approach achieves a 99.4% reduction in model size while retaining 89.3% of the original model's accuracy. Furthermore, it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 1.7% in accuracy with 60% fewer parameters. The framework also reduces training time by 72.1% and architecture search time by 34.88% compared to traditional genetic algorithms.
title Resource-Efficient Automatic Software Vulnerability Assessment via Knowledge Distillation and Particle Swarm Optimization
topic Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02840