Why Most ML Vulnerability Detection Fails

Jenny Guanni Qu, AI Researcher, Pebblebed, speaks at [un]prompted 2026 on: Why Most ML Vulnerability Detection Fails (And What Actually Worked for Kernel Bugs). We tried the obvious approaches to ML-based vulnerability detection. Most failed. This t...

Jenny Guanni Qu, AI Researcher, Pebblebed, speaks at [un]prompted 2026 on: Why Most ML Vulnerability Detection Fails (And What Actually Worked for Kernel Bugs).

We tried the obvious approaches to ML-based vulnerability detection. Most failed. This talk covers the counterintuitive lessons from training on 125K Linux kernel commits: why "hard negatives" hurt performance, why subsystem boundaries are where bugs hide, and why the average kernel security bug survives 2.1 years undetected. Practical takeaways for anyone building vuln discovery systems.