ExploreRepair: Evidence-Specialized Agents for Vulnerability Repair under Information Constraints

Automated vulnerability repair must often operate with incomplete vulnerability information: developers may lack an accurate vulnerability classification or a provided proof-of-vulnerability (PoV) test, yet still need to produce a repair. Without detailed information, a key challenge is to explore multiple plausible interpretations of the vulnerability before committing to a repair. To address this challenge, we propose ExploreRepair, a vulnerability repair framework that reconciles the vulnerability observations and repair implementations from a team of exploration agents. We first collect these observations and repair implementations from three agents, each tasked with exploring a specific dimension of the vulnerability. Then, a Lesson Aggregator and a Patch Aggregator independently synthesize repairs from these observations and concrete implementations before a final Aggregator reconciles their proposals without benchmark feedback. On PatchEval, ExploreRepair achieves repair success rates of 39.6% and 71.6% with GPT-5.6-Luna and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, respectively, exceeding EvoRepair, a state-of-the-art vulnerability repair approach, by 16.0 and 25.4 percentage points. On VulnLoc+, it achieves success rates of 51.4% and 62.9%, respectively, exceeding LoopRepair's variant without PoV tests by 20.0 and 17.1 percentage points.

Authors

Publication Details

Journal
arXiv (Cornell University)
Published
2026-10-29
DOI
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2610.39899
Primary Topic
Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
Type
preprint
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preprint

ExploreRepair: Evidence-Specialized Agents for Vulnerability Repair under Information Constraints

Ratnadira Widyasari, Hong Jin Kang, Rahul Gopinath, Ivana Clairine Irsan et al.
arXiv (Cornell University)
Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
preprint

ExploreRepair: Evidence-Specialized Agents for Vulnerability Repair under Information Constraints

Ratnadira Widyasari, Hong Jin Kang, Rahul Gopinath, Ivana Clairine Irsan, Đức Mạnh Trần, David Lo, Huihui Huang, Ting Zhang
preprint en

Abstract

Automated vulnerability repair must often operate with incomplete vulnerability information: developers may lack an accurate vulnerability classification or a provided proof-of-vulnerability (PoV) test, yet still need to produce a repair. Without detailed information, a key challenge is to explore multiple plausible interpretations of the vulnerability before committing to a repair. To address this challenge, we propose ExploreRepair, a vulnerability repair framework that reconciles the vulnerability observations and repair implementations from a team of exploration agents. We first collect these observations and repair implementations from three agents, each tasked with exploring a specific dimension of the vulnerability. Then, a Lesson Aggregator and a Patch Aggregator independently synthesize repairs from these observations and concrete implementations before a final Aggregator reconciles their proposals without benchmark feedback. On PatchEval, ExploreRepair achieves repair success rates of 39.6% and 71.6% with GPT-5.6-Luna and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, respectively, exceeding EvoRepair, a state-of-the-art vulnerability repair approach, by 16.0 and 25.4 percentage points. On VulnLoc+, it achieves success rates of 51.4% and 62.9%, respectively, exceeding LoopRepair's variant without PoV tests by 20.0 and 17.1 percentage points.

arXiv (Cornell University)
Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
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ExploreRepair: Evidence-Specialized Agents for Vulnerability Repair under Information Constraints — Ratnadira Widyasari, Hong Jin Kang, et al. · arXiv (Cornell University) (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS