Papers › An End-to-End Deep Learning Architecture for Classification of Malware’s Binary Content

An End-to-End Deep Learning Architecture for Classification of Malware’s Binary Content

27 Sep 2018archive 2025-07-28

Daniel Gibert, Carles Mateu, Jordi Planes

In traditional machine learning techniques for malware detection and classification, significant efforts are expended on manually designing features based on expertise and domain-specific knowledge. These solutions perform feature engineering in order to extract features that provide an abstract view of the software program. Thus, the usefulness of the classifier is roughly dependent on the ability of the domain experts to extract a set of descriptive features. Instead, we introduce a file agnostic end-to-end deep learning approach for malware classification from raw byte sequences without extracting hand-crafted features. It consists of two key components: (1) a denoising autoencoder that learns a hidden representation of the malware’s binary content; and (2) a dilated residual network as classifier. The experiments show an impressive performance, achieving almost 99% of accuracy classifying malware into families.

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Tasks

DenoisingDescriptiveFeature EngineeringGeneral ClassificationMalware ClassificationMalware Detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Malware Classification Microsoft Malware Classification Challenge Autoencoders+Residual Network Accuracy (10-fold) 0.9861 #10 of 29 Archive leaderboard report
Malware Classification Microsoft Malware Classification Challenge Autoencoders+Residual Network LogLoss 0.106343 #10 of 29 Archive leaderboard report
Malware Classification Microsoft Malware Classification Challenge Autoencoders+Residual Network Macro F1 (10-fold) 0.9719 #10 of 29 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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