EvoRepair: Enhancing Vulnerability Repair Agents Through Experience-Based Self-Evolution
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
Abstract (arXiv)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for automated vulnerability repair (AVR), but they still face several limitations, including the lack of intra-vulnerability experience accumulation and the lack of cross-vulnerability experience reuse. As a result, LLMs may repeatedly make similar mistakes during iterative repair and underutilize valuable repair knowledge from historical vulnerabilities. To address these challenges, we propose EvoRepair, the first experience-based self-evolving AVR agent framework that enables LLMs to accumulate, refine, and leverage domain-specific knowledge across long-horizon vulnerability repairs. EvoRepair follows a cyclic learn-and-repair process that retrieves relevant past experiences to guide repair, extracts new experiences from repair trajectories, and updates an experience bank using quality-aware scoring. We evaluate EvoRepair against 12 representative vulnerability repair baselines on PATCHEVAL and SEC-bench using GPT-5-mini. Results show that EvoRepair achieves the best overall performance, reaching 93.47% on PATCHEVAL, 87.00% on SEC-bench, and 90.46% overall. In particular, EvoRepair outperforms latest LLM-based baseline LoopRepair by 39.56% and 33.50% on PATCHEVAL and SEC-bench, respectively, and surpasses IntentFix by 70.86% and 50.50%. Across both benchmarks, EvoRepair also exceeds the recent self-evolving agent Live-SWE-Agent by 6.98% overall. Additional transfer experiments on VUL4J further demonstrate the robustness of EvoRepair across models, programming languages, and datasets. These findings demonstrate that experience-based self-evolution substantially strengthens agentic AVR and goes beyond existing self-evolving techniques.
Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 48 of its 84 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 May 2026.
Builds on
48 of 84 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2026VulnResolver: A Hybrid Agent Framework for LLM-Based Automated Vulnerability Issue Resolution20 Jan
- 2025SEC-bench: Automated Benchmarking of LLM Agents on Real-World Software Security Tasks13 Jun
Other references · 46
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- 2023ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learnerscited by 814
- 2020CodeBLEU: a Method for Automatic Evaluation of Code Synthesiscited by 468
34 more
- 2025Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Datacited by 323
- 2025R-Zero: Self-Evolving Reasoning LLM from Zero Datacited by 210
- 2025EvolveR: Self-Evolving LLM Agents through an Experience-Driven Lifecyclecited by 129
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- 2025Live-SWE-agent: Can Software Engineering Agents Self-Evolve on the Fly?cited by 91
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- 2021Neural Transfer Learning for Repairing Security Vulnerabilities in C Codecited by 36
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- 2025PATCHEVAL: A New Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Patching Real-World Vulnerabilitiescited by 19
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- 2025VulnRepairEval: An Exploit-Based Evaluation Framework for Assessing Large Language Model Vulnerability Repair Capabilitiescited by 11
- 2026Controlled Self-Evolution for Algorithmic Code Optimizationcited by 11
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- 2025Rethinking the Capability of Fine-Tuned Language Models for Automated Vulnerability Repaircited by 2
- 2026PatchIsland: Orchestration of LLM Agents for Continuous Vulnerability Repaircited by 2
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.
2 papers.
- 2026Self-Evolving Coding Agents4 Aug 2026
- 2026MultiFixer: A Coordinator-Proposer Based Multi-Agent Framework For Fixing Multi-Hunk Bugs29 Jul 2026
Similar, not cited
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- 2026Knowledge-Enhanced Agentic Vulnerability Repair
- 2024RepairAgent: An Autonomous, LLM-Based Agent for Program Repair
- 2026EvoUndo: Recoverability-Constrained Self-Evolution for LLM Agent Harnesses
- 2026RAVEN: Agentic RAG for Automated Vulnerability Repair
- 2026AgenticRepair: Multi-Faceted Program Context Engineering for Agentic Vulnerability Repair
- 2026MulVul: Retrieval-augmented Multi-Agent Code Vulnerability Detection via Cross-Model Prompt Evolution