Geometric Analysis and Metric Learning of Instruction Embeddings

Sajib Biswas, Timothy Barao, John Lazzari, Jeret McCoy, Xiuwen Liu, Alexander Kostandarithes

Abstract: Embeddings for instructions have been shown to be essential for software reverse engineering and automated program analysis. However, due to the complexity of dependencies and inherent variability of instructions, instruction embeddings using models that are successful for natural language processing may not be effective. In this paper, we perform geometric analysis of instruction embeddings at the token level and instruction family level, showing much greater variability and leading to degraded performance on intrinsic analyses. Then we propose to use metric learning to improve the relationships among instructions using triplet loss. Our results on a large dataset of instruction groups shows significant improvements. We also provide a theoretical analysis of the instruction embeddings by looking at the BERT components and characteristics of inner-product matrices for attention in the transformer blocks. The code will be available publicly after the paper is accepted for publication.