When Label Noise Meets Class Imbalance: A Robust Framework for Android Malware Family Classification

📅 2026-09-19
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
为解决安卓恶意软件家族分类中的标签噪声和类别不平衡问题,提出RoMaC框架,采用自训练策略修正标签,并区分处理头部和尾部家族样本,提高分类准确性和抗噪能力。
📝 Abstract
Machine learning methods for Android malware family classification have achieved high accuracy, but their application is hindered by two major challenges. First, the widely used code obfuscation severely disrupts the automated labeling process and introduces substantial label noise into training datasets. Second, training datasets often exhibit severe class imbalance, leading to poor performance of family classification models. Although existing studies have proposed various solutions to either label noise or class imbalance, they often overlook the interplay between these two factors. Under class imbalance, the presence of hard-to-learn minority-class samples can significantly impair the effectiveness of existing countermeasures for noisy samples. To jointly address label noise and class imbalance, we propose a robust Android malware family classification framework, RoMaC. It employs a self-training strategy to correct noisy labels and, more importantly, discriminately treats head-family and tail-family samples. This design effectively mitigates the adverse impact of class imbalance on noise-robust learning. Moreover, RoMaC integrates a class reweighting mechanism with multi-model ensemble learning, thereby enhancing both classification accuracy and noise robustness. We evaluate RoMaC on a combined dataset constructed from two public datasets. When 30% of the samples are obfuscated, RoMaC achieves an overall Macro-F1 score of 0.803 and an accuracy of 0.871, as well as a tail-class Macro-F1 score of 0.672 and an accuracy of 0.784. Compared with existing methods, RoMaC demonstrates performance improvements of 6%-20% across various obfuscation scenarios and noise levels.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Label Noise
Class Imbalance
Android Malware
Family Classification
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

self-training strategy
class imbalance mitigation
multi-model ensemble learning
noise robustness
H
Haolan Zhang
School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China
C
Cuiying Gao
School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China; also with JD.com, Beijing 100000, China
F
Fulin Zhao
School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China
H
Heng Li
School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China; also with The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong 999077, China
H
Haoran Wang
School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China
C
Chang Luo
School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China
T
Tiejun Wu
NSFOCUS Technologies Group Co., Ltd., Beijing 100000, China
H
Hui Shu
Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security, Ministry of Education, Zhengzhou, 450000, China
W
Wei Yuan
School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China