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
- Ratnadira Widyasari (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8190-5458)
- Hong Jin Kang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7335-7295)
- Rahul Gopinath (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9953-0930)
- Ivana Clairine Irsan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6350-2700)
- Đức Mạnh Trần (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-5151-8635)
- David Lo (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4367-7201)
- Huihui Huang
- Ting Zhang
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