EvoRepair: Enhancing Vulnerability Repair Agents Through Experience-Based Self-Evolution

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hu, Haichuan, Xie, Guoqing, Zhang, Quanjun, Liu, Jiawei, Yu, Shengcheng, Fang, Chunrong, Chen, Zhenyu, Xiao, Liang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Hu, Haichuan
Xie, Guoqing
Zhang, Quanjun
Liu, Jiawei
Yu, Shengcheng
Fang, Chunrong
Chen, Zhenyu
Xiao, Liang
author_facet Hu, Haichuan
Xie, Guoqing
Zhang, Quanjun
Liu, Jiawei
Yu, Shengcheng
Fang, Chunrong
Chen, Zhenyu
Xiao, Liang
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for automated vulnerability repair (AVR), but they still face several limitations, including the lack of intra-vulnerability experience accumulation and the lack of cross-vulnerability experience reuse. As a result, LLMs may repeatedly make similar mistakes during iterative repair and underutilize valuable repair knowledge from historical vulnerabilities. To address these challenges, we propose EvoRepair, the first experience-based self-evolving AVR agent framework that enables LLMs to accumulate, refine, and leverage domain-specific knowledge across long-horizon vulnerability repairs. EvoRepair follows a cyclic learn-and-repair process that retrieves relevant past experiences to guide repair, extracts new experiences from repair trajectories, and updates an experience bank using quality-aware scoring. We evaluate EvoRepair against 12 representative vulnerability repair baselines on PATCHEVAL and SEC-bench using GPT-5-mini. Results show that EvoRepair achieves the best overall performance, reaching 93.47% on PATCHEVAL, 87.00% on SEC-bench, and 90.46% overall. In particular, EvoRepair outperforms latest LLM-based baseline LoopRepair by 39.56% and 33.50% on PATCHEVAL and SEC-bench, respectively, and surpasses IntentFix by 70.86% and 50.50%. Across both benchmarks, EvoRepair also exceeds the recent self-evolving agent Live-SWE-Agent by 6.98% overall. Additional transfer experiments on VUL4J further demonstrate the robustness of EvoRepair across models, programming languages, and datasets. These findings demonstrate that experience-based self-evolution substantially strengthens agentic AVR and goes beyond existing self-evolving techniques.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_30105
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EvoRepair: Enhancing Vulnerability Repair Agents Through Experience-Based Self-Evolution
Hu, Haichuan
Xie, Guoqing
Zhang, Quanjun
Liu, Jiawei
Yu, Shengcheng
Fang, Chunrong
Chen, Zhenyu
Xiao, Liang
Software Engineering
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for automated vulnerability repair (AVR), but they still face several limitations, including the lack of intra-vulnerability experience accumulation and the lack of cross-vulnerability experience reuse. As a result, LLMs may repeatedly make similar mistakes during iterative repair and underutilize valuable repair knowledge from historical vulnerabilities. To address these challenges, we propose EvoRepair, the first experience-based self-evolving AVR agent framework that enables LLMs to accumulate, refine, and leverage domain-specific knowledge across long-horizon vulnerability repairs. EvoRepair follows a cyclic learn-and-repair process that retrieves relevant past experiences to guide repair, extracts new experiences from repair trajectories, and updates an experience bank using quality-aware scoring. We evaluate EvoRepair against 12 representative vulnerability repair baselines on PATCHEVAL and SEC-bench using GPT-5-mini. Results show that EvoRepair achieves the best overall performance, reaching 93.47% on PATCHEVAL, 87.00% on SEC-bench, and 90.46% overall. In particular, EvoRepair outperforms latest LLM-based baseline LoopRepair by 39.56% and 33.50% on PATCHEVAL and SEC-bench, respectively, and surpasses IntentFix by 70.86% and 50.50%. Across both benchmarks, EvoRepair also exceeds the recent self-evolving agent Live-SWE-Agent by 6.98% overall. Additional transfer experiments on VUL4J further demonstrate the robustness of EvoRepair across models, programming languages, and datasets. These findings demonstrate that experience-based self-evolution substantially strengthens agentic AVR and goes beyond existing self-evolving techniques.
title EvoRepair: Enhancing Vulnerability Repair Agents Through Experience-Based Self-Evolution
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30105