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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Morbiato, Filippo, Keller, Markus, Nair, Priya, Romano, Luca
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14166
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Table of Contents:
  • Mapping Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) text to MITRE ATT\&CK technique IDs is a critical task for understanding adversary behaviors and automating threat defense. While recent Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approaches have demonstrated promising capabilities in this domain, they fundamentally rely on a flat retrieval paradigm. By treating all techniques uniformly, these methods overlook the inherent taxonomy of the ATT\&CK framework, where techniques are structurally organized under high-level tactics. In this paper, we propose H-TechniqueRAG, a novel hierarchical RAG framework that injects this tactic-technique taxonomy as a strong inductive bias to achieve highly efficient and accurate annotation. Our approach introduces a two-stage hierarchical retrieval mechanism: it first identifies the macro-level tactics (the adversary's technical goals) and subsequently narrows the search to techniques within those tactics, effectively reducing the candidate search space by 77.5\%. To further bridge the gap between retrieval and generation, we design a tactic-aware reranking module and a hierarchy-constrained context organization strategy that mitigates LLM context overload and improves reasoning precision. Comprehensive experiments across three diverse CTI datasets demonstrate that H-TechniqueRAG not only outperforms the state-of-the-art TechniqueRAG by 3.8\% in F1 score, but also achieves a 62.4\% reduction in inference latency and a 60\% decrease in LLM API calls. Further analysis reveals that our hierarchical structural priors equip the model with superior cross-domain generalization and provide security analysts with highly interpretable, step-by-step decision paths.