Early Comparative Evaluation of Transformer Models for Multilingual Software Vulnerability Detection

Abstract

Software vulnerability detection is increasingly important as modern applications combine multiple programming languages. This paper presents an early comparative evaluation of BERT, RoBERTa, and CodeBERT for binary vulnerability detection across HTML, Python, JavaScript, and PHP using the CVEFixes dataset and language-wise three-fold stratified cross-validation. The results show clear performance differences across languages, indicating that multilingual vulnerability detection requires more language-aware and robust transformer-based modelling strategies.