arXiv:2604. 23025v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Android malware detectors built with machine learning often suffer from temporal bias: models are trained and evaluated without respecting apps' actual release times, inflating accuracy and weakening real-world robustness.
arXiv:2608. 03250v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid advancement of modern technology has led to a significant increase in the use of smart devices, such as smartphones and tablets, resulting in the widespread adoption of mobile applications.
arXiv:2503.11841v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine Learning (ML) malware detectors rely heavily on crowd-sourced AntiVirus (AV) labels, with platforms like VirusTotal serving as truste...
arXiv:2605. 09028v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine learning-based Android malware detectors often fail in real-world deployment due to domain shift, where models trained on one data source perform poorly on applications from another.
arXiv:2606. 16072v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compared with binaries and decompiled code, malware source code more directly reflects the attackers' original intent.
arXiv:2512. 20872v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Function call graphs (FCGs) have emerged as a powerful abstraction for malware detection, capturing the behavioral structure of applications beyond surface-level signatures.
The study evaluates pseudo‑labeling for semi‑supervised learning on Android malware attribution using six classifiers. Results show that the benefit of SSL varies strongly by classifier: SVM gains the most, LightGBM improves modestly, and Random Forest can be harmed at low label ratios. The approach particularly helps hard‑to‑classify families and achieves near‑optimal performance with about 800 labeled samples.
arXiv:2606. 26707v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adversarial APKs are Android applications modified in the problem space to evade machine-learning malware detectors.
The paper introduces Replicant, a deep reinforcement learning framework that learns to evade malware detectors under a strict label‑only black‑box threat model. Replicant generates reusable policies for modifying malware samples and deciding when to query the target, and it transfers across different samples, detectors, and feature spaces. In experiments on seven Android malware detectors and three feature spaces, Replicant achieves a mean attack success rate of 78.8%, outperforming state‑of‑the‑art methods by 20.9%–39.2% and providing a stronger signal for adversarial training to harden detectors.
The paper introduces a new benchmark for assessing out-of-distribution robustness in graph-based Android malware classifiers, highlighting that current models drop up to 45% accuracy on unseen malware variants. It presents two scenarios—MalNet-Tiny-Common for covariate shift and MalNet-Tiny-Distinct for domain shift—and identifies a limitation in existing benchmarks that rely solely on structure-only function call graphs. To address this, the authors propose a semantic enrichment framework that augments graph topology with function-level attributes and LLM-based code embeddings, demonstrating that this data-centric approach improves robustness under distribution shift and complements model-based methods.
arXiv:2507. 18313v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Malware evolves rapidly, forcing machine learning-based detectors to be continuously updated.
HYDRA is a proactive Android malware drift adaptation framework that learns drift‑invariant representations from hierarchically structured data. It combines fine‑grained Control Flow Graphs and coarse‑grained Function Call Graphs to model applications, then applies a cross‑domain contrastive learning objective to align historical and new data distributions. Experiments on large‑scale, time‑ordered malware datasets show HYDRA achieves lower false negative and false positive rates than state‑of‑the‑art baselines while needing up to 87.5% fewer labeled samples.
arXiv:2605. 24903v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine learning based malware detectors become obsolete over time due to concept drift in benign and malware applications.