Towards Benchmarking Design Pattern Detection Under Obfuscation: Reproducing and Evaluating Attention-Based Detection Method

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Shenoy, Manthan, Rausch, Andreas
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866918236704997376
author Shenoy, Manthan
Rausch, Andreas
author_facet Shenoy, Manthan
Rausch, Andreas
contents This paper investigates the semantic robustness of attention-based classifiers for design pattern detection, particularly focusing on their reliance on structural and behavioral semantics. We reproduce the DPDAtt, an attention-based design pattern detection approach using learning-based classifiers, and evaluate its performance under obfuscation. To this end, we curate an obfuscated version of the DPDAtt Corpus, where the name identifiers in code such as class names, method names, etc., and string literals like print statements and comment blocks are replaced while preserving control flow, inheritance, and logic. Our findings reveal that these trained classifiers in DPDAtt depend significantly on superficial syntactic features, leading to substantial misclassification when such cues are removed through obfuscation. This work highlights the need for more robust detection tools capable of capturing deeper semantic meanings in source code. We propose our curated Obfuscated corpus (containing 34 Java source files) as a reusable proof-of-concept benchmark for evaluating state-of-the-art design pattern detectors on their true semantic generalization capabilities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_07193
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Benchmarking Design Pattern Detection Under Obfuscation: Reproducing and Evaluating Attention-Based Detection Method
Shenoy, Manthan
Rausch, Andreas
Software Engineering
This paper investigates the semantic robustness of attention-based classifiers for design pattern detection, particularly focusing on their reliance on structural and behavioral semantics. We reproduce the DPDAtt, an attention-based design pattern detection approach using learning-based classifiers, and evaluate its performance under obfuscation. To this end, we curate an obfuscated version of the DPDAtt Corpus, where the name identifiers in code such as class names, method names, etc., and string literals like print statements and comment blocks are replaced while preserving control flow, inheritance, and logic. Our findings reveal that these trained classifiers in DPDAtt depend significantly on superficial syntactic features, leading to substantial misclassification when such cues are removed through obfuscation. This work highlights the need for more robust detection tools capable of capturing deeper semantic meanings in source code. We propose our curated Obfuscated corpus (containing 34 Java source files) as a reusable proof-of-concept benchmark for evaluating state-of-the-art design pattern detectors on their true semantic generalization capabilities.
title Towards Benchmarking Design Pattern Detection Under Obfuscation: Reproducing and Evaluating Attention-Based Detection Method
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07193