Paper ID: 2412.02048

Impact of Data Snooping on Deep Learning Models for Locating Vulnerabilities in Lifted Code

Gary A. McCully, John D. Hastings, Shengjie Xu

This study examines the impact of data snooping on neural networks for vulnerability detection in lifted code, building on previous research which used word2vec, and unidirectional and bidirectional transformer-based embeddings. The research specifically focuses on how model performance is affected when embedding models are trained on datasets, including samples also used for neural network training and validation. The results show that introducing data snooping did not significantly alter model performance, suggesting that data snooping had a minimal impact or that samples randomly dropped as part of the methodology contained hidden features critical to achieving optimal performance. In addition, the findings reinforce the conclusions of previous research, which found that models trained with GPT-2 embeddings consistently outperformed neural networks trained with other embeddings. The fact that this holds even when data snooping is introduced into the embedding model indicates GPT-2's robustness in representing complex code features, even under less-than-ideal conditions.

Submitted: Dec 3, 2024