Multimodal malware classification based on hierarchical bidirectional cross-attention

Li Li
Wang Yunjing
School of Computer and Artificial Intelligence, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin 150040, China

Abstract

To address the problems of insufficient expressive capability of single-modal features and the difficulty of traditional fusion methods in capturing deep cross-modal correlations, we propose a multimodal malicious code classification model named BiCA-MalNet based on a hierarchical bidirectional cross-attention mechanism. The model first constructs three-channel structural feature images, namely W, E, and L, from bytecode files using energy-adaptive wavelet transform, sliding window entropy, and Local Binary Pattern, while simultaneously extracting semantic features from assembly code using GraphCodeBERT. On this basis, we design a channel-wise bidirectional cross-attention mechanism to internally fuse multi-channel image features, and then employ a cross-modal bidirectional cross-attention mechanism to achieve deep interaction and enhancement between image structural features and textual semantic features. On the Microsoft BIG2015 dataset, the model achieves an accuracy of 99.63%, and on the self-constructed PEDataset, it achieves 95.18%. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed hierarchical bidirectional cross-attention fusion strategy can effectively improve the classification performance of complex malicious code.

Foundation Support

黑龙江省重点研发计划项目(黑龙江省科技厅)(2022ZX01A30)
黑龙江省"揭榜挂帅"科技攻关项目(黑龙江省科技厅)(2023ZXJ02C03)
2024年度黑龙江省高等教育教学改革研究重点项目(黑龙江省教育厅)(SJGZB2024069)

Publish Information

DOI: 10.19734/j.issn.1001-3695.2026.05.0180
Publish at: Application Research of Computers Accepted Paper, Vol. 44, 2027 No. 2

Publish History

[2026-10-23] Accepted Paper

Cite This Article

李莉, 王云静. 基于分层双向交叉注意力的多模态恶意代码分类 [J]. 计算机应用研究, 2027, 44 (2). (2026-10-24). https://doi.org/10.19734/j.issn.1001-3695.2026.05.0180. (Li Li, Wang Yunjing. Multimodal malware classification based on hierarchical bidirectional cross-attention [J]. Application Research of Computers, 2027, 44 (2). (2026-10-24). https://doi.org/10.19734/j.issn.1001-3695.2026.05.0180. )

About the Journal

  • Application Research of Computers Monthly Journal
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Application Research of Computers, founded in 1984, is an academic journal of computing technology sponsored by Sichuan Institute of Computer Sciences under the Science and Technology Department of Sichuan Province.

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