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Related papers: The Effect of Code Obfuscation on Human Program Co…

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The goal of homomorphic encryption is to encrypt data such that another party can operate on it without being explicitly exposed to the content of the original data. We introduce an idea for a privacy-preserving transformation on natural…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-28 Zhifeng Hu , Serhii Havrylov , Ivan Titov , Shay B. Cohen

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted for code vulnerability detection, their reliability and robustness across diverse vulnerability types have become a pressing concern. In traditional adversarial settings, code…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Xiao Li , Yue Li , Hao Wu , Yue Zhang , Yechao Zhang , Fengyuan Xu , Sheng Zhong

Code obfuscation is the conversion of original source code into a functionally equivalent but less readable form, aiming to prevent reverse engineering and intellectual property theft. This is a challenging task since it is crucial to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Lorenzo De Tomasi , Claudio Di Sipio , Antinisca Di Marco , Phuong T. Nguyen

Code has become a standard component of modern foundation language model (LM) training, yet its role beyond programming remains unclear. We revisit the claim that code improves reasoning through controlled pretraining experiments on a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Yuze Zhao , Junpeng Fang , Lu Yu , Zhenya Huang , Kai Zhang , Qing Cui , Qi Liu , Jun Zhou , Enhong Chen

A typical approach to programming is to first code the main execution scenario, and then focus on filling out alternative behaviors and corner cases. But, almost always, there exist unusual conditions that trigger atypical behaviors, which…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-01-20 Jessie Galasso , Michalis Famelis , Houari Sahraoui

Obfuscation of computer programs has historically been approached either as a practical but \textit{ad hoc} craft to make reverse engineering subjectively difficult, or as a sound theoretical investigation unfortunately detached from the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Ali Ajorian , Erick Lavoie , Christian Tschudin

Software obfuscation techniques can prevent binary diffing techniques from locating vulnerable code by obfuscating the third-party code, to achieve the purpose of protecting embedded device software. With the rapid development of binary…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Peihua Zhang , Chenggang Wu , Mingfan Peng , Kai Zeng , Ding Yu , Yuanming Lai , Yan Kang , Wei Wang , Zhe Wang

Semantic understanding of programs has attracted great attention in the community. Inspired by recent successes of large language models (LLMs) in natural language understanding, tremendous progress has been made by treating programming…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Jianyu Zhao , Yuyang Rong , Yiwen Guo , Yifeng He , Hao Chen

Code deobfuscation is the task of recovering a readable version of a program while preserving its original behavior. In practice, this often requires days or even months of manual work with complex and expensive analysis tools. In this…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Seyedreza Mohseni , Sarvesh Baskar , Edward Raff , Manas Gaur

There are repetitive patterns in strategies of manipulating source code. For example, modifying source code before acquiring knowledge of how a code works is a depth-first style and reading and understanding before modifying source code is…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2016-12-01 Zahra Karimia , Ahmad Baraani-Dastjerdia , Nasser Ghasem-Aghaeea , Stefan Wagner

Understanding program code is a complicated endeavor. As such, myriad different factors can influence the outcome. Investigations of program comprehension, and in particular those using controlled experiments, have to take these factors…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-17 Dror G. Feitelson

While natural-language explanations from large language models (LLMs) are widely adopted to improve transparency and trust, their impact on objective human-AI team performance remains poorly understood. We identify a Persuasion Paradox:…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Ruth Cohen , Lu Feng , Ayala Bloch , Sarit Kraus

Code super-optimization is the task of transforming any given program to a more efficient version while preserving its input-output behaviour. In some sense, it is similar to the paraphrase problem from natural language processing where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-29 Rudy Bunel , Alban Desmaison , M. Pawan Kumar , Philip H. S. Torr , Pushmeet Kohli

The effect of surprisal on processing difficulty has been a central topic of investigation in psycholinguistics. Here, we use eyetracking data to examine three language processing regimes that are common in daily life but have not been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Keren Gruteke Klein , Yoav Meiri , Omer Shubi , Yevgeni Berzak

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in understanding and generating codes. Due to these capabilities, many recent methods are proposed to automatically refine the codes with LLMs. However, we should…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Minju Seo , Jinheon Baek , Sung Ju Hwang

Code reasoning is a fundamental capability for large language models (LLMs) in the code domain. It involves understanding and predicting a program's execution behavior, such as determining the output for a given input or whether a specific…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Lingxiao Tang , He Ye , Zhongxin Liu , Xiaoxue Ren , Lingfeng Bao

Background: Despite similar education and background, programmers can exhibit vast differences in efficacy. While research has identified some potential factors, such as programming experience and domain knowledge, the effect of these…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-03-14 Norman Peitek , Annabelle Bergum , Maurice Rekrut , Jonas Mucke , Matthias Nadig , Chris Parnin , Janet Siegmund , Sven Apel

Metacognition has been recognized as an essential skill for academic success and for performance in solving problems. During learning or problem-solving, metacognitive skills facilitate a range of cognitive and affective processes, leading…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Bostjan Bubnic , Željko Kovačević , Tomaž Kosar

Large language models are increasingly trained on corpora containing both natural language and non-linguistic data like source code. Aside from aiding programming-related tasks, anecdotal evidence suggests that including code in pretraining…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Jackson Petty , Sjoerd van Steenkiste , Tal Linzen

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in software engineering, yet their effectiveness for binary analysis remains unexplored. We present the first comprehensive evaluation of commercial LLMs for assembly code deobfuscation.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Anton Tkachenko , Dmitrij Suskevic , Benjamin Adolphi