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[CVE virtual event submission] Talk: From Binary Vulnerability Detection to CWE Classification: A Hierarchical Prompting Study #57

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@tonasoft

Dear CVE secretariat,

we are submitting the following session proposal:

Format: Lightning Talk
Theme Alignment: Representing uncertainty and abstraction more clearly
Contributors: Obinna Okeke, Sushant Nepal, Venkat Sai Suman Lamba Karanam, Yan Wu


Abstract:

We evaluated GPT-4o on the SecVulEval benchmark across 145 CWE categories, measuring the gap between binary vulnerability detection (vulnerable vs. safe) and exact CWE classification. We introduced a "Family Accuracy" metric and found that while exact CWE classification accuracy was low, models correctly identified the broader CWE family (parent/child/sibling relationships) far more often — showing that most classification errors are near misses between closely related CWEs rather than random or cross-family mistakes.

Possible discussion questions could include:

  • How should CVE/CWE tooling represent classification confidence when a model identifies the correct family but not the exact CWE?
  • What structural or hierarchical CWE information could be surfaced during CWE assignment to reduce near-miss errors?
  • How does prompt-only LLM classification compare to fine-tuned or retrieval-augmented approaches for CWE assignment at scale?

Full details are available in our published paper, "From Binary Vulnerability Detection to CWE Classification: A Hierarchical Prompting Study" (ISDFS 2026, IEEE): https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11459116

I know I'm submitting this after the July 14 deadline, but would be happy to be considered if there is still room on the agenda.

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