MSSA: multi-stage semantic-aware neural network for binary code similarity detection
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Binary code similarity detection (BCSD) aims to identify whether a pair of binary code snippets is similar, which is widely used for tasks such as malware analysis, patch analysis, and clone detection. Current state-of-the-art approaches are based on Transformer, which require substantial computation resources. Learning-based approaches remains room for optimization in learning the deeper semantics of binary code. In this paper, we propose MSSA, a multi-stage semantic-aware neural network for BCSD at the function level. It effectively integrates the semantic and structural information of assembly instructions within and between basic blocks, and across the entire function through four semantic-aware neural networks, achieving deep understanding of binary code semantics. MSSA is a lightweight model with only 0.38M parameters in its backbone network, suitable for deployment in CPU environments. Experimental results show that MSSA outperforms Gemini, Asm2Vec, SAFE, and jTrans in classification performance and ranks second only to the Transformer-based jTrans in retrieval performance.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it