Verify Before You Fix: Agentic Execution Grounding for Trustworthy Cross-Language Code Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cross-language vulnerability analysis framework using LLMs, grounded in execution confirmation, achieving high accuracy and explainability for trustworthy AI in software security.

Contribution

It presents a novel unified vulnerability lifecycle framework with execution-grounded validation and cross-language generalization via a shared structural schema and hybrid embeddings.

Findings

Achieves 89.84-92.02% intra-language detection accuracy.

Attains 74.43-80.12% zero-shot cross-language F1.

Resolves 69.74% of vulnerabilities end-to-end.

Abstract

Learned classifiers deployed in agentic pipelines face a fundamental reliability problem: predictions are probabilistic inferences, not verified conclusions, and acting on them without grounding in observable evidence leads to compounding failures across downstream stages. Software vulnerability analysis makes this cost concrete and measurable. We address this through a unified cross-language vulnerability lifecycle framework built around three LLM-driven reasoning stages-hybrid structural-semantic detection, execution-grounded agentic validation, and validation-aware iterative repair-governed by a strict invariant: no repair action is taken without execution-based confirmation of exploitability. Cross-language generalization is achieved via a Universal Abstract Syntax Tree (uAST) normalizing Java, Python, and C++ into a shared structural schema, combined with a hybrid fusion of GraphSAGE and Qwen2.5-Coder-1.5B embeddings through learned two-way gating, whose per-sample weights provide intrinsic explainability at no additional cost. The framework achieves 89.84-92.02% intra-language detection accuracy and 74.43-80.12% zero-shot cross-language F1, resolving 69.74% of vulnerabilities end-to-end at a 12.27% total failure rate. Ablations establish necessity: removing uAST degrades cross-language F1 by 23.42%, while disabling validation increases unnecessary repairs by 131.7%. These results demonstrate that execution-grounded closed-loop reasoning is a principled and practically deployable mechanism for trustworthy LLM-driven agentic AI.