• 中国计算机学会会刊
  • 中国科技核心期刊
  • 中文核心期刊
Computer Network and Znformation Security

A reinforcement learning-based method for generating adversarial examples against PE malware

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  • (1.School of Cyber Science and Engineering,Southeast University,Nanjing 211189;
    2.Key Laboratory of Computer Network and Information Integration (Southeast University),
    Ministry of Education,Nanjing 211189,China)

Received date: 2024-02-27

  Revised date: 2024-09-24

  Online published: 2026-04-29

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Abstract

This paper proposes a reinforcement learning-based method for generating adversarial examples against PE malware. Firstly, it regards the generation of adversarial examples for PE malware as a sequence-to-sequence generation task, which models sequences on an offline reinforcement learning dataset and leverages the powerful sequence generation capability of Transformer by incrementally generating sequences through predicting actions at each step. Furthermore, an information transmission mechanism is introduced to facilitate cross-episode information transfer during the reinforcement learning process, enhancing data efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that the evasion rate of PE malware adversarial examples generated using this method outperforms those in comparative experiments and exhibits transferability.


Cite this article

ZHANG Chaoran, MA Yuqi, ZHANG Sanfeng, YANG Wang . A reinforcement learning-based method for generating adversarial examples against PE malware[J]. Computer Engineering & Science, 2026 , 48(4) : 617 -627 . DOI: 10.3969/j.issn.1007-130X.2026.04.006

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