# Antares: Foundation Models for Agentic Vulnerability Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02407 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02407/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 45 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent threats, guardrails and governance](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-threats-guardrails-and-governance/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19256/) (2024)
- [Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09516/) (2025)
- [τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12045/) (2024)
- [gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10925/) (2025)
- [Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03533/) (2022)
- [τ2-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07982/) (2025)
- [Kimi K2: Open Agentic Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20534/) (2025)
- [GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06471/) (2025)
- [WebThinker: Empowering Large Reasoning Models with Deep Research Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21776/) (2025)
- [DeepResearcher: Scaling Deep Research via Reinforcement Learning in Real-world Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03160/) (2025)
- [SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16941/) (2025)
- [NYU CTF Bench: A Scalable Open-Source Benchmark Dataset for Evaluating LLMs in Offensive Security](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05590/) (2024)
- [CyberGym: Evaluating AI Agents' Real-World Cybersecurity Capabilities at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02548/) (2025)
- [ReasonIR: Training Retrievers for Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20595/) (2025)
- [DeepRetrieval: Hacking Real Search Engines and Retrievers with Large Language Models via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00223/) (2025)
- [CTIBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Cyber Threat Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07599/) (2024)
- [The MiniMax-M2 Series: Mini Activations Unleashing Max Real-World Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26494/) (2026)
- [RepoAudit: An Autonomous LLM-Agent for Repository-Level Code Auditing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18160/) (2025)
- [OpenResearcher: A Fully Open Pipeline for Long-Horizon Deep Research Trajectory Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20278/) (2026)
- [ReposVul: A Repository-Level High-Quality Vulnerability Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13169/) (2024)
- [Llama-3.1-FoundationAI-SecurityLLM-Base-8B Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21039/) (2025)
- [Next-Latent Prediction Transformers Learn Compact World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05963/) (2025)
- [ExploitGym: Can AI Agents Turn Security Vulnerabilities into Real Attacks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11086/) (2026)
- [RaDeR: Reasoning-aware Dense Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18405/) (2025)
- [Primus: A Pioneering Collection of Open-Source Datasets for Cybersecurity LLM Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11191/) (2025)
- [Llama-3.1-FoundationAI-SecurityLLM-8B-Instruct Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01059/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [The History Is the Detector: Executing CVE Patch History, End-to-End](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05335/) (2026)
- [The Tokens Remember: When Tokenization Bypasses Knowledge Editing and Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29045/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vulnerability localization is a fundamental step in software security, requiring models to reason over large codebases and iteratively identify vulnerable implementations. We present Antares, a family of compact language models (350M, 1B, and 3B parameters) for agentic vulnerability localization. Based on IBM Granite base models, Antares is trained through a two-stage pipeline that combines supervised fine-tuning on cybersecurity reasoning and repository exploration data with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards over vulnerable repositories. Across extensive evaluations, Antares-3B approaches GPT-5.5 while outperforming open-weight models over 200x larger in size. The Antares family further enables fast, low-cost local inference, completing a full 500-task evaluation sweep in approximately 15 minutes on a single H100 GPU, corresponding to an amortized evaluation time of under 2 seconds and less than 0.002 per task.