Mahdi Khalili

Yiming Fan, Jun Yeon Won, Ding Zhu et al.

Binary Function Similarity Detection (BFSD) is a core problem in software security, supporting tasks such as vulnerability analysis, malware classification, and patch provenance. In the past few decades, numerous models and tools have been developed for this application; however, due to the lack of a comprehensive universal benchmark in this field, researchers have struggled to compare different models effectively. Existing datasets are limited in scope, often focusing on a narrow set of transformations or types of binaries, and fail to reflect the full diversity of real-world applications. We introduce EXHIB, a benchmark comprising five realistic datasets collected from the wild, each highlighting a distinct aspect of the BFSD problem space. We evaluate 9 representative models spanning multiple BFSD paradigms on EXHIB and observe performance degradations of up to 30% on firmware and semantic datasets compared to standard settings, revealing substantial generalization gaps. Our results show that robustness to low- and mid-level binary variations does not generalize to high-level semantic differences, underscoring a critical blind spot in current BFSD evaluation practices.

Tian Xie, Ding Zhu, Jia Liu et al.

Performative prediction (PP) is an algorithmic framework for optimizing machine learning (ML) models where the model's deployment affects the distribution of the data it is trained on. Compared to traditional ML with fixed data, designing algorithms in PP converging to a stable point -- known as a stationary performative stable (SPS) solution -- is more challenging than the counterpart in conventional ML tasks due to the model-induced distribution shifts. While considerable efforts have been made to find SPS solutions using methods such as repeated gradient descent (RGD) and greedy stochastic gradient descent (SGD-GD), most prior studies assumed a strongly convex loss until a recent work established $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ convergence of SGD-GD to SPS solutions under smooth, non-convex losses. However, this latest progress is still based on the restricted bounded variance assumption in stochastic gradient estimates and yields convergence bounds with a non-vanishing error neighborhood that scales with the variance. This limitation motivates us to improve convergence rates and reduce error in stochastic optimization for PP, particularly in non-convex settings. Thus, we propose a new algorithm called stochastic performative prediction with variance reduction (SPRINT) and establish its convergence to an SPS solution at a rate of $O(1/T)$. Notably, the resulting error neighborhood is independent of the variance of the stochastic gradients. Experiments on multiple real datasets with non-convex models demonstrate that SPRINT outperforms SGD-GD in both convergence rate and stability.