ResearchResearch paperSafety & Alignment · Agents & Tool Use1 source · Oct 9, 2026

Natural Code Transformation Confuses Agents in Vulnerability Analysis

Along this line, our study of agent trajectories in vulnerability analysis shows a surprising finding: agents produce dramatically different results across real-world code commits that carry the same functionality and the same vulnerability.

Key points

  • Having demonstrated a strong potential for automating vulnerability discovery, AI agents can also be used to attack software systems at scale.
  • Today's software systems need mechanisms to level the playing field by slowing down potential attacks, giving them time to patch vulnerabilities and strengthen software.
  • We build a corpus of natural transformations by mining recurring development patterns from real-world code commits, and apply them to evaluate impact on agentic vulnerability analysis.
  • Overall, our study of natural code transformation significantly expands the research space of using code transformations to defend against malicious agents.

Sources (1)

  • [1]Natural Code Transformation Confuses Agents in Vulnerability Analysis
    arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 9, 09:55 PM
    Along this line, our study of agent trajectories in vulnerability analysis shows a surprising finding: agents produce dramatically different results across real-world code commits that carry the same functionality and the same vulnerability.
    Having demonstrated a strong potential for automating vulnerability discovery, AI agents can also be used to attack software systems at scale.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.

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