Image-Based Malware Type Classification on MalNet-Image Tiny: Effects of Multi-Scale Fusion, Transfer Learning, Data Augmentation, and Schedule-Free Optimization

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 22 Apr 2026] Image-Based Malware Type Classification on MalNet-Image Tiny: Effects of Multi-Scale Fusion, Transfer Learning, Data Augmentation, and Schedule-Free Optimization Ahmed A. Abouelkhaire, Waleed A. Yousef, Issa Traor This paper studies 43-class malware type classification on MalNet-Image Tiny, a public benchmark derived from Android APK files. The goal is to assess whether a compact image classifier benefits from four components evaluated in a controlled ablation: a feature pyramid network (FPN) for scale variation induced by resizing binaries of different lengths, ImageNet pretraining, lightweight augmentation through Mixup and TrivialAugment, and schedule-free AdamW optimization. All experiments use a ResNet18 backbone and the provided train/validation/test split. Reproducing the benchmark-style configuration yields macro-F1 (F1_macro) of 0.6510, consistent with the reported baseline of approximately 0.65. Replacing the optimizer with schedule-free AdamW and using unweighted cross-entropy increases F1_macro to 0.6535 in 10 epochs, compared with 96 epochs for the reproduced baseline. The best configuration combines pretraining, Mixup, TrivialAugment, and FPN, reaching F1_macro=0.6927, P_macro=0.7707, AUC_macro=0.9556, and L_test=0.8536. The ablation indicates that the largest gains in F1_macro arise from pretraining and augmentation, whereas FPN mainly improves P_macro, AUC_macro, and L_test in the strongest configuration. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2604.21153 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.21153v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.21153 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Waleed Yousef [view email] [v1] Wed, 22 Apr 2026 23:45:44 UTC (1,607 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)