BugScope: Learn to Find Bugs Like Human (2507.15671v1)

Abstract: Detecting software bugs remains a fundamental challenge due to the extensive diversity of real-world defects. Traditional static analysis tools often rely on symbolic workflows, which restrict their coverage and hinder adaptability to customized bugs with diverse anti-patterns. While recent advances incorporate LLMs to enhance bug detection, these methods continue to struggle with sophisticated bugs and typically operate within limited analysis contexts. To address these challenges, we propose BugScope, an LLM-driven multi-agent system that emulates how human auditors learn new bug patterns from representative examples and apply that knowledge during code auditing. Given a set of examples illustrating both buggy and non-buggy behaviors, BugScope synthesizes a retrieval strategy to extract relevant detection contexts via program slicing and then constructs a tailored detection prompt to guide accurate reasoning by the LLM. Our evaluation on a curated dataset of 40 real-world bugs drawn from 21 widely-used open-source projects demonstrates that BugScope achieves 87.04% precision and 90.00% recall, surpassing state-of-the-art industrial tools by 0.44 in F1 score. Further testing on large-scale open-source systems, including the Linux kernel, uncovered 141 previously unknown bugs, of which 78 have been fixed and 7 confirmed by developers, highlighting BugScope's substantial practical impact.