From Runnable to Verifiable: An Independent Reproducibility Study of LLM/Agent-Driven Vulnerability Validation Artifacts
Bo Chen
Abstract
Security research artifacts---repositories, PoC exploits, and validation pipelines---are increasingly produced by LLM/agent-driven vulnerability workflows, yet the gap between \emph{publicly available}, \emph{runnable}, \emph{signal-producing}, and \emph{semantically confirmed} artifacts is poorly measured. We conduct a pre-registered reproducibility audit of this literature. A search covering 2023--2026 with dual screening yields a 104-paper consensus corpus, of which 59 papers (56.7\%) have a publicly reachable artifact. We execute an 18-paper sample at R0/R1 and all 102 cases of the anchor benchmark (arXiv:2509.24037), with patched-counterfactual verdicts on 30 signal-producing cases and matched-negative-control verdicts on 19. Three findings stand out. First, 58/102 (56.9\%) anchor cases contain a script-internal CVE identifier that diverges from the declared directory CVE. Second, only 10/18 (55.6\%) paper-level artifacts complete their declared workflow at R0, rising to 11/18 (61.1\%) after environment-only R1 repair. Third, artifact-embedded oracles prove unreliable: 20/30 patched-counterfactual audits still produce the claimed signal on the patched build, 7/19 matched negative controls still trigger on benign input, and the oracle confusion matrix has sensitivity 60\% and specificity 45\%. A trigger on the vulnerable build is not evidence of CVE-specific reproduction without a clean patched counterfactual. These are exploratory results from a pre-registered protocol, and our protocol---pre-registered post-conditions, R0/R1 repair ladder, G1--G3 semantic evidence levels, and patched-counterfactual oracles---is a reusable template for the security reproducibility community.