LLM-based Vulnerability Detection at Project Scale: An Empirical Study
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arXiv
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| Auteurs principaux: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Publié: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866917225048309760 |
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| author | Li, Fengjie Jiang, Jiajun Chen, Dongchi Xiong, Yingfei |
| author_facet | Li, Fengjie Jiang, Jiajun Chen, Dongchi Xiong, Yingfei |
| contents | In this paper, we present the first comprehensive empirical study of specialized LLM-based detectors and compare them with traditional static analyzers at the project scale. Specifically, our study evaluates five latest and representative LLM-based methods and two traditional tools using: 1) an in-house benchmark of 222 known real-world vulnerabilities (C/C++ and Java) to assess detection capability, and 2) 24 active open-source projects, where we manually inspected 385 warnings to assess their practical usability and underlying root causes of failures. Our evaluation yields three key findings: First, while LLM-based detectors exhibit low recall on the in-house benchmark, they still uncover more unique vulnerabilities than traditional tools. Second, in open-source projects, both LLM-based and traditional tools generate substantial warnings but suffer from very high false discovery rates, hindering practical use. Our manual analysis further reveals shallow interprocedural reasoning and misidentified source/sink pairs as primary failure causes, with LLM-based tools exhibiting additional unique failures. Finally, LLM-based methods incurs substantial computational costs-hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of tokens and multi-hour to multi-day runtimes. Overall, our findings underscore critical limitations in the robustness, reliability, and scalability of current LLM-based detectors. We ultimately summarize a set of implications for future research toward more effective and practical project-scale vulnerability detection. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_19239 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | LLM-based Vulnerability Detection at Project Scale: An Empirical Study Li, Fengjie Jiang, Jiajun Chen, Dongchi Xiong, Yingfei Software Engineering In this paper, we present the first comprehensive empirical study of specialized LLM-based detectors and compare them with traditional static analyzers at the project scale. Specifically, our study evaluates five latest and representative LLM-based methods and two traditional tools using: 1) an in-house benchmark of 222 known real-world vulnerabilities (C/C++ and Java) to assess detection capability, and 2) 24 active open-source projects, where we manually inspected 385 warnings to assess their practical usability and underlying root causes of failures. Our evaluation yields three key findings: First, while LLM-based detectors exhibit low recall on the in-house benchmark, they still uncover more unique vulnerabilities than traditional tools. Second, in open-source projects, both LLM-based and traditional tools generate substantial warnings but suffer from very high false discovery rates, hindering practical use. Our manual analysis further reveals shallow interprocedural reasoning and misidentified source/sink pairs as primary failure causes, with LLM-based tools exhibiting additional unique failures. Finally, LLM-based methods incurs substantial computational costs-hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of tokens and multi-hour to multi-day runtimes. Overall, our findings underscore critical limitations in the robustness, reliability, and scalability of current LLM-based detectors. We ultimately summarize a set of implications for future research toward more effective and practical project-scale vulnerability detection. |
| title | LLM-based Vulnerability Detection at Project Scale: An Empirical Study |
| topic | Software Engineering |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19239 |