Favia: Forensic Agent for Vulnerability-fix Identification and Analysis
Identifying vulnerability-fixing commits corresponding to disclosed CVEs is essential for secure software maintenance but remains challenging at scale, as large repositories contain millions of commits of which only a small fraction address security issues. Existing automated approaches, including traditional machine learning techniques and recent large language model (LLM)-based methods, often suffer from poor precision-recall trade-offs. Frequently evaluated on randomly sampled commits, we uncover that they are substantially underestimating real-world difficulty, where candidate commits are already security-relevant and highly similar. We propose Favia, a forensic, agent-based framework for vulnerability-fix identification that combines scalable candidate ranking with deep and iterative semantic reasoning. Favia first employs an efficient ranking stage to narrow the search space of commits. Each commit is then rigorously evaluated using a ReAct-based LLM agent. By providing the agent with a pre-commit repository as environment, along with specialized tools, the agent tries to localize vulnerable components, navigates the codebase, and establishes causal alignment between code changes and vulnerability root causes. This evidence-driven process enables robust identification of indirect, multi-file, and non-trivial fixes that elude single-pass or similarity-based methods. We evaluate Favia on CVEVC, a large-scale dataset we made that comprises over 8 million commits from 3,708 real-world repositories, and show that it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art traditional and LLM-based baselines under realistic candidate selection, achieving the strongest precision-recall trade-offs and highest F1-scores.
69931c4450fb2c0be4783b4c
André Storhaug
claimed_verified
2026-02-16T15:22:22.098Z
621997b88e4346d1e0f23bc9
https://cdn-avatars.huggingface.co/v1/production/uploads/621997b88e4346d1e0f23bc9/CjcujryUSttV9Hm7K9_7H.jpeg
André Storhaug
andstor
user
andstor
69931c4450fb2c0be4783b4d
Jiamou Sun
69931c4450fb2c0be4783b4e
Jingyue Li
Favia: Forensic Agent for Vulnerability-fix Identification and Analysis
Identifying vulnerability-fixing commits corresponding to disclosed CVEs is essential for secure software maintenance but remains challenging at scale, as large repositories contain millions of commits of which only a small fraction address security issues. Existing automated approaches, including traditional machine learning techniques and recent large language model (LLM)-based methods, often suffer from poor precision-recall trade-offs. Frequently evaluated on randomly sampled commits, we uncover that they are substantially underestimating real-world difficulty, where candidate commits are already security-relevant and highly similar. We propose Favia, a forensic, agent-based framework for vulnerability-fix identification that combines scalable candidate ranking with deep and iterative semantic reasoning. Favia first employs an efficient ranking stage to narrow the search space of commits. Each commit is then rigorously evaluated using a ReAct-based LLM agent. By providing the agent with a pre-commit repository as environment, along with specialized tools, the agent tries to localize vulnerable components, navigates the codebase, and establishes causal alignment between code changes and vulnerability root causes. This evidence-driven process enables robust identification of indirect, multi-file, and non-trivial fixes that elude single-pass or similarity-based methods. We evaluate Favia on CVEVC, a large-scale dataset we made that comprises over 8 million commits from 3,708 real-world repositories, and show that it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art traditional and LLM-based baselines under realistic candidate selection, achieving the strongest precision-recall trade-offs and highest F1-scores.
Favia is a forensic, agent-based framework that combines scalable candidate ranking with deep semantic reasoning to accurately identify vulnerability-fixing commits by leveraging LLM agents with specialized tools and environmental context.
ReAct-based LLM agent candidate ranking semantic reasoning vulnerability-fixing commits CVEVC dataset precision-recall trade-offs LLM-based methods traditional machine learning techniques