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arxivcs.CRcs.LG2026-07-01

Hamm-Grams: An Algorithm for Mining Regular Expressions of Bytes

Derek Everett, Edward Raff, James Holt

Malware poses a critical and ever-evolving threat, and robust and effective systems for detecting and classifying malware are of essential importance. $n$-grams features are among the common static features used in effective machine learning systems for malware, but these features are inherently brittle. We propose an algorithm for constructing more robust features, hamm-grams, which are a special class of regular expressions having a fixed length and single-character wildcards. We devise an efficient algorithm for finding common hamm-grams using a new locality-sensitive hash designed to produce collisions among pairs of small Hamming distance and a clustering within hash buckets to place wildcards. We then demonstrate the advantages of these features in malware classification and detection tasks.

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arxivcs.CRcs.CLcs.LG2026-07-23

Adversarial Prompts for Acceptance Collapse in Speculative Decoding

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Self-Poisoning in Adaptive Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Sharp-Threshold Theory and Certified Label-Free Calibration

Vishnu Bindu Balachandran

Test-time adaptive out-of-distribution (OOD) detectors update a memory bank from the unlabelled stream. We show this adaptation obeys a provable dynamical law. Modelling bank impurity as a generalized Pólya urn, we prove almost-sure convergence to a mean-field equilibrium whose s…

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