mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Binary BPE: A Family of Cross-Platform Tokenizers for Binary Analysis

arXiv 2511.17573 ↗First posted 14 Nov 2025cs.LG cs.AI cs.CRcited by 2

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Abstract (arXiv)

Sequence models for binary analysis are bottlenecked by byte-level tokenization: raw bytes waste precious context window capacity for transformers and other neural network architectures, and many existing text-oriented tokenizers fail on arbitrary 0x00--0xFF sequences. To address this issue, we introduce the Binary BPE tokenizer family, a set of cross-platform Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenizers for executables trained on a large corpus of binaries spanning multiple platforms, architectures, and operating systems, including Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, and malware sources. We release trained tokenizers with vocabularies of 4K, 8K, 16K, 32K, and 64K tokens, enabling both systematic scaling studies and practical deployment from resource-constrained edge devices to high-throughput datacenters. These tokenizers discover interpretable patterns (ELF/PE headers, instruction sequences, cross-platform strings) while yielding multi-byte compression per token. On representative uncompressed executables (e.g., ELF/PE/Mach-O rather than compressed APKs), the Binary BPE tokenizers typically allow for roughly 2-3x more binary content per fixed-length transformer context window than raw bytes, enabling more efficient research and practical deployment for content identification, malware detection, reverse engineering, and optimization. We release the trained Binary BPE tokenizers on HuggingFace, providing a drop-in, open-source foundation for binary-focused language models and context-efficient agentic tools.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 11 of its 23 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2025.

Builds on

11 of 23 references.

References · 11

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  2. 2015Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Unitscited by 2,898
  3. 2018EMBER: An Open Dataset for Training Static PE Malware Machine Learning Modelscited by 164
  4. 2017Malware Detection by Eating a Whole EXEcited by 114
  5. 2017Neural Network-based Graph Embedding for Cross-Platform Binary Code Similarity Detectioncited by 65
  6. 2020SOREL-20M: A Large Scale Benchmark Dataset for Malicious PE Detectioncited by 49
  7. 2018SAFE: Self-Attentive Function Embeddings for Binary Similaritycited by 33
  8. 2024Assemblage: Automatic Binary Dataset Construction for Machine Learningcited by 12
  9. 2020Bin2vec: Learning Representations of Binary Executable Programs for Security Taskscited by 8
  10. 2025How Different Tokenization Algorithms Impact LLMs and Transformer Models for Binary Code Analysiscited by 3
  11. 2024A Progressive Transformer for Unifying Binary Code Embedding and Knowledge Transfercited by 1

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Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 1.

2 papers.

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  1. 2026Byte Language Models: Scaling, Emergent Abstractions, and Information Allocation
  2. 2026ByteFlow: Language Modeling through Adaptive Byte Compression without a Tokenizer
  3. 2026Tokenizer-Agnostic Engram Module
  4. 2025Cross-modal Retrieval Models for Stripped Binary Analysis
  5. 2023BTR: Binary Token Representations for Efficient Retrieval Augmented Language Models
  6. 2025Cramming 1568 Tokens into a Single Vector and Back Again: Exploring the Limits of Embedding Space Capacity
  7. 2026Separate Before You Compress: The WWHO Tokenization Architecture
  8. 2025Back to Bytes: Revisiting Tokenization Through UTF-8