# Identifier-Free Code Embedding Models for Scalable Search

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05251 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05251/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05176/) (2025)
- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [MTEB: Massive Text Embedding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07316/) (2022)
- [C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07597/) (2023)
- [Jina Embeddings 2: 8192-Token General-Purpose Text Embeddings for Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19923/) (2023)
- [PalmTree: Learning an Assembly Language Model for Instruction Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03809/) (2021)
- [CoRNStack: High-Quality Contrastive Data for Better Code Retrieval and Reranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01007/) (2024)
- [Assemblage: Automatic Binary Dataset Construction for Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03991/) (2024)
- [Pre-Training Representations of Binary Code Using Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05102/) (2022)
- [Cross-modal Retrieval Models for Stripped Binary Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10393/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Function association is a useful process for binary reverse engineers. Search tools exist to perform association at scale, but they do not utilize the full range of capabilities that AI-enabled search provides. Prior work has explored the development of embedding models for association between certain reverse engineering code representations, but that work does not cover bidirectional association between source code and decompiled, stripped code with standard preprocessing requirements. To bridge this gap, we formalize this function association problem and evaluate the extent to which embedding models can bidirectionally associate between these two representations. To improve model performance at this task, we fine-tune a Qwen3-Embedding model with contrastive learning. We find that our new model outperforms other models on all function association baselines by a substantial margin and generalizes to a constant-algorithm association task it is not explicitly trained on.