MITRE-SAGE: A Multi-Agent Cybersecurity Question-Answering Model

Abstract

Effective cybersecurity operations require timely and accurate analysis of large-scale heterogeneous security information; however, analysts increasingly struggle with information overload, alert fatigue, and time-constrained decision-making. Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities for question answering (QA), their effectiveness in cybersecurity remains limited by insufficient domain knowledge, a tendency to hallucinate, and difficulties in capturing both semantic and structural relationships. This work proposes MITRE-SAGE, a multi-agent retrieval-augmented generation framework that integrates semantic and structural cybersecurity knowledge to improve the reliability and interpretability of LLM-based QA systems. By decomposing complex tasks into query interpretation, evidence retrieval, and answer synthesis, MITRE-SAGE effectively supports cybersecurity tasks such as vulnerability assessment, threat profiling, and relationship extraction. Furthermore, we propose MITRE-QA, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 3,000 question-answer pairs for evaluating LLMs across diverse cybersecurity knowledge tasks, and use it to systematically evaluate MITRE-SAGE against representative baseline methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MITRE-SAGE consistently outperforms standalone LLMs and conventional RAG approaches. Notably, a lightweight configuration comprising Qwen2.5-7B sub-agents and a Qwen2.5-14B orchestrator achieves superior performance on five of the eight benchmark tasks, indicating the effectiveness of the proposed multi-agent framework. The results highlight the potential of MITRE-SAGE as a scalable and interpretable approach for reliable cybersecurity QA, while MITRE-QA provides a standardized benchmark for future research.