Diverse LLMs vs. Vulnerabilities: Who Detects and Fixes Them Better?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zibaeirad, Arastoo, Vieira, Marco
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zibaeirad, Arastoo
Vieira, Marco
author_facet Zibaeirad, Arastoo
Vieira, Marco
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being studied for Software Vulnerability Detection (SVD) and Repair (SVR). Individual LLMs have demonstrated code understanding abilities, but they frequently struggle when identifying complex vulnerabilities and generating fixes. This study presents DVDR-LLM, an ensemble framework that combines outputs from diverse LLMs to determine whether aggregating multiple models reduces error rates. Our evaluation reveals that DVDR-LLM achieves 10-12% higher detection accuracy compared to the average performance of individual models, with benefits increasing as code complexity grows. For multi-file vulnerabilities, the ensemble approach demonstrates significant improvements in recall (+18%) and F1 score (+11.8%) over individual models. However, the approach raises measurable trade-offs: reducing false positives in verification tasks while simultaneously increasing false negatives in detection tasks, requiring careful decision on the required level of agreement among the LLMs (threshold) for increased performance across different security contexts. Artifact: https://github.com/Erroristotle/DVDR_LLM
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_12536
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Diverse LLMs vs. Vulnerabilities: Who Detects and Fixes Them Better?
Zibaeirad, Arastoo
Vieira, Marco
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being studied for Software Vulnerability Detection (SVD) and Repair (SVR). Individual LLMs have demonstrated code understanding abilities, but they frequently struggle when identifying complex vulnerabilities and generating fixes. This study presents DVDR-LLM, an ensemble framework that combines outputs from diverse LLMs to determine whether aggregating multiple models reduces error rates. Our evaluation reveals that DVDR-LLM achieves 10-12% higher detection accuracy compared to the average performance of individual models, with benefits increasing as code complexity grows. For multi-file vulnerabilities, the ensemble approach demonstrates significant improvements in recall (+18%) and F1 score (+11.8%) over individual models. However, the approach raises measurable trade-offs: reducing false positives in verification tasks while simultaneously increasing false negatives in detection tasks, requiring careful decision on the required level of agreement among the LLMs (threshold) for increased performance across different security contexts. Artifact: https://github.com/Erroristotle/DVDR_LLM
title Diverse LLMs vs. Vulnerabilities: Who Detects and Fixes Them Better?
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12536