LSNet: Adaptive Latent Space Networks for Vulnerability Severity Assessment

Due to the increasing harmfulness of software vulnerabilities, it is increasingly suggested to propose more efficient vulnerability assessment methods. However, existing methods mainly rely on manual updates and inefficient rule matching, and they struggle to capture potential correlations between vulnerabilities, thus resulting in issues such as strong subjectivity and low efficiency. To this end, a vulnerability severity assessment method named Latent Space Networks (LSNet) is proposed in this paper. Specifically, based on a clustering analysis in Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) metrics, we first exploit relations for CVSS metrics prediction and propose an adaptive transformer to extract vulnerability from both global semantic and local latent space features. Then, we utilize bidirectional encoding and token masking techniques to enhance the model’s understanding of vulnerability–location relationships, and combine the Transformer method with convolution to significantly improve the model’s ability to identify vulnerable text. Finally, extensive experiments conducted on the open vulnerability dataset and the CCF OSC2024 dataset demonstrate that LSNet is capable of extracting potential correlation features. Compared with baseline methods, including SVM, Transformer, TextCNN, BERT, DeBERTa, ALBERT, and RoBERTa, it exhibits higher accuracy and efficiency.