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Main Authors: Park, Jimin, Ji, AHyun, Park, Minji, Rahman, Mohammad Saidur, Oh, Se Eun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01110
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author Park, Jimin
Ji, AHyun
Park, Minji
Rahman, Mohammad Saidur
Oh, Se Eun
author_facet Park, Jimin
Ji, AHyun
Park, Minji
Rahman, Mohammad Saidur
Oh, Se Eun
contents Continual Learning (CL) for malware classification tackles the rapidly evolving nature of malware threats and the frequent emergence of new types. Generative Replay (GR)-based CL systems utilize a generative model to produce synthetic versions of past data, which are then combined with new data to retrain the primary model. Traditional machine learning techniques in this domain often struggle with catastrophic forgetting, where a model's performance on old data degrades over time. In this paper, we introduce a GR-based CL system that employs Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with feature matching loss to generate high-quality malware samples. Additionally, we implement innovative selection schemes for replay samples based on the model's hidden representations. Our comprehensive evaluation across Windows and Android malware datasets in a class-incremental learning scenario -- where new classes are introduced continuously over multiple tasks -- demonstrates substantial performance improvements over previous methods. For example, our system achieves an average accuracy of 55% on Windows malware samples, significantly outperforming other GR-based models by 28%. This study provides practical insights for advancing GR-based malware classification systems. The implementation is available at \url {https://github.com/MalwareReplayGAN/MalCL}\footnote{The code will be made public upon the presentation of the paper}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_01110
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MalCL: Leveraging GAN-Based Generative Replay to Combat Catastrophic Forgetting in Malware Classification
Park, Jimin
Ji, AHyun
Park, Minji
Rahman, Mohammad Saidur
Oh, Se Eun
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Continual Learning (CL) for malware classification tackles the rapidly evolving nature of malware threats and the frequent emergence of new types. Generative Replay (GR)-based CL systems utilize a generative model to produce synthetic versions of past data, which are then combined with new data to retrain the primary model. Traditional machine learning techniques in this domain often struggle with catastrophic forgetting, where a model's performance on old data degrades over time. In this paper, we introduce a GR-based CL system that employs Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with feature matching loss to generate high-quality malware samples. Additionally, we implement innovative selection schemes for replay samples based on the model's hidden representations. Our comprehensive evaluation across Windows and Android malware datasets in a class-incremental learning scenario -- where new classes are introduced continuously over multiple tasks -- demonstrates substantial performance improvements over previous methods. For example, our system achieves an average accuracy of 55% on Windows malware samples, significantly outperforming other GR-based models by 28%. This study provides practical insights for advancing GR-based malware classification systems. The implementation is available at \url {https://github.com/MalwareReplayGAN/MalCL}\footnote{The code will be made public upon the presentation of the paper}.
title MalCL: Leveraging GAN-Based Generative Replay to Combat Catastrophic Forgetting in Malware Classification
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01110