Yifeng Di
Author directory2026
VEX-Bench: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Assessing Exploitability of Software Supply Chain Vulnerabilities
Jiahao Shi | Edward Tsien | Yifeng Di | Hongjiao Zhang | Yuan Tang | Ronit Dey | Ilona Shishov | Gal Netanel | Zvi Grinberg | Vladimir Belousov | Bat-Zion Rotman | Ilan Pinto | Tianyi Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jiahao Shi | Edward Tsien | Yifeng Di | Hongjiao Zhang | Yuan Tang | Ronit Dey | Ilona Shishov | Gal Netanel | Zvi Grinberg | Vladimir Belousov | Bat-Zion Rotman | Ilan Pinto | Tianyi Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The software supply chain has become an increasingly exposed attack surface because of its reliance on intricate yet fragile dependencies. Existing defenses such as GitHub Dependabot often raise many false alerts because their coarse-grained matching cannot determine whether a vulnerable dependency is actually exploitable. Security analysts typically spend substantial time assessing vulnerability exploitability case by case. Recent LLM agents have emerged as promising candidates for this task given their advanced capabilities in coding and cybersecurity, yet no existing benchmark evaluates them on it. Prior benchmarks target zero-day settings, where agents detect and exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities. In contrast, software supply chain security focuses on how known vulnerabilities in upstream dependencies affect downstream projects. This requires agents to reason across repositories and determine whether an upstream vulnerability is exploitable in the downstream project. To address this gap, we introduce VEX-Bench, the first benchmark for evaluating LLM agents’ ability to assess the exploitability of software supply chain vulnerabilities. It contains 75 real-world cases mined from GitHub and labeled by security experts, covering Python, Java, and Go. We evaluate nine models across three agent harnesses. While GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.6 reach approximately 80% F1 on binary vulnerability-status classification, only GPT-5.5 surpasses 70% macro-F1 on fine-grained justification classification. This gap highlights the challenge of moving beyond binary exploitability assessment to identifying fine-grained exploitability reasons. Code and data: https://github.com/steven1518/vex-bench
Mango: Multi-Agent Web Navigation via Global-View Optimization
Weixi Tong | Yifeng Di | Tianyi Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Weixi Tong | Yifeng Di | Tianyi Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Existing web agents typically initiate exploration from the root URL, which is inefficient for complex websites with deep hierarchical structures. Without a global view of the website’s structure, agents frequently fall into navigation traps, explore irrelevant branches, or fail to reach target information within a limited budget. We propose Mango, a multi-agent web navigation method that leverages the website structure to dynamically determine optimal starting points. We formulate URL selection as a multi-armed bandit problem and employ Thompson Sampling to adaptively allocate the navigation budget across candidate URLs. Furthermore, we introduce an episodic memory component to store navigation history, enabling the agent to learn from previous attempts. Experiments on WebVoyager demonstrate that Mango achieves a success rate of 63.6% when using GPT-5-mini, outperforming the best baseline by 7.3%. Furthermore, on WebWalkerQA, Mango attains a 52.5% success rate, surpassing the best baseline by 26.8%. We also demonstrate the generalizability of Mango using both open-source and closed-source models as backbones. Our data and code are open-source and available at https://github.com/VichyTong/Mango.