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Mohammad Meymani

Publications and source records attributed to Mohammad Meymani.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

KAN-Robust-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating the Robustness of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

While machine learning models have demonstrated strong performance in many domains, these models have shown profound vulnerabilities when they are exposed to adversarial threats. While adversarial attacks fall into various categories, the most prominent category in research studies is evasion. In evasion attacks, the adversary generates perturbed versions of samples, which might not be observable by human eyes. These samples generally fool the machine learning models with high confidence. This phenomenon poses a significant security violation against machine learning models. In this paper, we investigate the certified and empirical robustness of various Kolmogorov-Arnold network architectures against strong evasion attacks. At first, we provide the mathematical foundations for randomized smoothing and interval bound propagation, and report the $\ell_2$-certified robustness of the models under randomized smoothing. After that, we systematically evaluate the robustness of various defended and undefended KAN models under FGSM, PGD, and C&W attacks in order to find out the optimal defense strategies and architectures.

cs.LG

Can Small GenAI Language Models Rival Large Language Models in Understanding Application Behavior?

Generative AI (GenAI) models, particularly large language models (LLMs), have transformed multiple domains, including natural language processing, software analysis, and code understanding. Their ability to analyze and generate code has enabled applications such as source code summarization, behavior analysis, and malware detection. In this study, we systematically evaluate the capabilities of both small and large GenAI language models in understanding application behavior, with a particular focus on malware detection as a representative task. While larger models generally achieve higher overall accuracy, our experiments show that small GenAI models maintain competitive precision and recall, offering substantial advantages in computational efficiency, faster inference, and deployment in resource-constrained environments. We provide a detailed comparison across metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, highlighting each model's strengths, limitations, and operational feasibility. Our findings demonstrate that small GenAI models can effectively complement large ones, providing a practical balance between performance and resource efficiency in real-world application behavior analysis.

cs.SE

Quantum Adversarial Machine Learning: From Classical Adaptations to Quantum-Native Methods

Machine learning has revolutionized numerous industrial domains. Despite recent advances, machine learning models remain vulnerable to adversarial threats. Adversarial machine learning is a field that studies these vulnerabilities to build robust machine learning models. Quantum machine learning is an interdisciplinary field that bridges quantum computing and classical machine learning. While quantum machine learning shows potentials to outperform classical machine learning in complex tasks such as regression, classification, and generative modeling, it remains vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Given the recent advancements in quantum computing and machine learning, the quantum adversarial machine learning field has emerged to study the vulnerabilities of quantum machine learning, possible attacks, and novel quantum-enhanced defense strategies. In this survey, we provide a detailed overview on quantum adversarial machine learning and explore the existing attacks and countermeasures. We also review the theoretical underpinnings of this area, emerging trends, and critical challenges.

cs.LG

Integrating Graphs, Large Language Models, and Agents: Reasoning and Retrieval

Generative AI, particularly Large Language Models, increasingly integrates graph-based representations to enhance reasoning, retrieval, and structured decision-making. Despite rapid advances, there remains limited clarity regarding when, why, where, and what types of graph-LLM integrations are most appropriate across applications. This survey provides a concise, structured overview of the design choices underlying the integration of graphs with LLMs. We categorize existing methods based on their purpose (reasoning, retrieval, generation, recommendation), graph modality (knowledge graphs, scene graphs, interaction graphs, causal graphs, dependency graphs), and integration strategies (prompting, augmentation, training, or agent-based use). By mapping representative works across domains such as cybersecurity, healthcare, materials science, finance, robotics, and multimodal environments, we highlight the strengths, limitations, and best-fit scenarios for each technique. This survey aims to offer researchers a practical guide for selecting the most suitable graph-LLM approach depending on task requirements, data characteristics, and reasoning complexity.

cs.AI

LLM4CodeRE: Generative AI for Code Decompilation Analysis and Reverse Engineering

Code decompilation analysis is a fundamental yet challenging task in malware reverse engineering, particularly due to the pervasive use of sophisticated obfuscation techniques. Although recent large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in translating low-level representations into high-level source code, most existing approaches rely on generic code pretraining and lack adaptation to malicious software. We propose LLM4CodeRE, a domain-adaptive LLM framework for bidirectional code reverse engineering that supports both assembly-to-source decompilation and source-to-assembly translation within a unified model. To enable effective task adaptation, we introduce two complementary fine-tuning strategies: (i) a Multi-Adapter approach for task-specific syntactic and semantic alignment, and (ii) a Seq2Seq Unified approach using task-conditioned prefixes to enforce end-to-end generation constraints. Experimental results demonstrate that LLM4CodeRE outperforms existing decompilation tools and general-purpose code models, achieving robust bidirectional generalization.

cs.CR

Automated Malware Family Classification using Weighted Hierarchical Ensembles of Large Language Models

Malware family classification remains a challenging task in automated malware analysis, particularly in real-world settings characterized by obfuscation, packing, and rapidly evolving threats. Existing machine learning and deep learning approaches typically depend on labeled datasets, handcrafted features, supervised training, or dynamic analysis, which limits their scalability and effectiveness in open-world scenarios. This paper presents a zero-label malware family classification framework based on a weighted hierarchical ensemble of pretrained large language models (LLMs). Rather than relying on feature-level learning or model retraining, the proposed approach aggregates decision-level predictions from multiple LLMs with complementary reasoning strengths. Model outputs are weighted using empirically derived macro-F1 scores and organized hierarchically, first resolving coarse-grained malicious behavior before assigning fine-grained malware families. This structure enhances robustness, reduces individual model instability, and aligns with analyst-style reasoning.

cs.CR

Divided We Fall: Defending Against Adversarial Attacks via Soft-Gated Fractional Mixture-of-Experts with Randomized Adversarial Training

Machine learning is a powerful tool enabling full automation of a huge number of tasks without explicit programming. Despite recent progress of machine learning in different domains, these models have shown vulnerabilities when they are exposed to adversarial threats. Adversarial threats aim to hinder the machine learning models from satisfying their objectives. They can create adversarial perturbations, which are imperceptible to humans' eyes but have the ability to cause misclassification during inference. In this paper, we propose a defense system, which devises an adversarial training module within mixture-of-experts architecture to enhance its robustness against white-box evasion attacks. In our proposed defense system, we use nine pre-trained classifiers (experts) with ResNet-18 as their backbone. During end-to-end training, the parameters of all experts and the gating mechanism are jointly updated allowing further optimization of the experts. Our proposed defense system outperforms prior MoE-based defenses under strong white-box FGSM and PGD evaluation on CIFAR-10 and SVHN. The use of multiple experts increases training time and compute relative to single-network baselines; however, inference scales approximately linearly with the number of experts and is substantially cheaper than training.

cs.LG

Asm2SrcEval: Evaluating Large Language Models for Assembly-to-Source Code Translation

Assembly-to-source code translation is a critical task in reverse engineering, cybersecurity, and software maintenance, yet systematic benchmarks for evaluating large language models on this problem remain scarce. In this work, we present the first comprehensive evaluation of five state-of-the-art large language models on assembly-to-source translation. We assess model performance using a diverse set of metrics capturing lexical similarity (BLEU, ROUGE, and METEOR), semantic alignment (BERTScore), fluency (Perplexity), and efficiency (time prediction). Our results reveal clear trade-offs: while certain models excel in text similarity metrics, others demonstrate lower perplexity or faster inference times. We further provide qualitative analyses of typical model successes and failure cases, highlighting challenges such as control flow recovery and identifier reconstruction. Taken together, our benchmark offers actionable insights into the strengths and limitations of current large language models for program translation, establishing a foundation for future research in combining accuracy with efficiency for real-world applications.

cs.SE

SBAN: A Framework & Multi-Dimensional Dataset for Large Language Model Pre-Training and Software Code Mining

This paper introduces SBAN (Source code, Binary, Assembly, and Natural Language Description), a large-scale, multi-dimensional dataset designed to advance the pre-training and evaluation of large language models (LLMs) for software code analysis. SBAN comprises more than 3 million samples, including 2.9 million benign and 672,000 malware respectively, each represented across four complementary layers: binary code, assembly instructions, natural language descriptions, and source code. This unique multimodal structure enables research on cross-representation learning, semantic understanding of software, and automated malware detection. Beyond security applications, SBAN supports broader tasks such as code translation, code explanation, and other software mining tasks involving heterogeneous data. It is particularly suited for scalable training of deep models, including transformers and other LLM architectures. By bridging low-level machine representations and high-level human semantics, SBAN provides a robust foundation for building intelligent systems that reason about code. We believe that this dataset opens new opportunities for mining software behavior, improving security analytics, and enhancing LLM capabilities in pre-training and fine-tuning tasks for software code mining.

cs.IR

XGen-Q: An Explainable Domain-Adaptive LLM Framework with Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Software Security

Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in code understanding, but their use in cybersecurity, particularly for malware detection and analysis, remains limited. Existing detection systems often fail to generalize to obfuscated or previously unseen threats, underscoring the need for more adaptable and explainable models. To address this challenge, we introduce XGen-Q, a domain-adapted LLM built on the Qwen-Coder architecture and pretrained on a large-scale corpus of over one million malware samples, spanning both source and assembly code. XGen-Q uses a multi-stage prompt strategy combined with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to deliver reliable malware identification and detailed forensic reporting, even in the presence of complex code obfuscation. To further enhance generalization, we design a training pipeline that systematically exposes the model to diverse obfuscation patterns. Experimental results show that XGen-Q achieves significantly lower perplexity than competitive baselines and exhibits strong performance on novel malware samples, demonstrating the promise of LLM-based approaches for interpretable and robust malware analysis.

cs.IR

NLD-LLM: A systematic framework for evaluating small language transformer models on natural language description

Natural Language Description (NLD) is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) task that requires models to generate structured and meaningful outputs from natural language inputs. In this work, we propose NLD-LLM, a systematic NLP framework to evaluate the performance of language models to generate accurate and concise source code descriptions. This framework incorporates a diverse set of transformer models, including Qwen, DeepSeek, Phi, LLaMA, and Mistral, spanning various sizes, architectures, and training approaches. Central to NLD-LLM is a comprehensive prompt design strategy that includes standardized formatting, clear task guidance, and NLD prompting, ensuring fair and consistent evaluation. Additionally, we apply an iterative refinement process to improve output's quality and assess the model's adaptability. Using semantic and structural metrics, our analysis demonstrates that prompt engineering significantly impacts the effectiveness of the model such that smaller models often performing competitively when supported by well-crafted prompts.

cs.CL

Large Language Models (LLMs) for Source Code Analysis: applications, models and datasets

Large language models (LLMs) and transformer-based architectures are increasingly utilized for source code analysis. As software systems grow in complexity, integrating LLMs into code analysis workflows becomes essential for enhancing efficiency, accuracy, and automation. This paper explores the role of LLMs for different code analysis tasks, focusing on three key aspects: 1) what they can analyze and their applications, 2) what models are used and 3) what datasets are used, and the challenges they face. Regarding the goal of this research, we investigate scholarly articles that explore the use of LLMs for source code analysis to uncover research developments, current trends, and the intellectual structure of this emerging field. Additionally, we summarize limitations and highlight essential tools, datasets, and key challenges, which could be valuable for future work.

cs.SE