ECAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper
ASMA-Tune: Unlocking LLMs' Assembly Code Comprehension via Structural-Semantic Instruction Tuning
- Xinyi Wang
- Jiashui Wang
- Jinbo Su
- Ke Wang
- Peng Chen
- Yanming Liu
- Long Liu
- Xiang Li
Assembly code analysis and comprehension play critical roles in applications like reverse engineering, yet they face substantial challenges due to low information density and a lack of explicit syntactic structures. While traditional masked language modeling (MLM) approaches do not explicitly focus on natural language interaction, emerging decoder-focused large language models (LLMs) demonstrate partial success in binary analysis yet remain underexplored for holistic comprehension. We present Assembly Augmented Tuning (ASMA-Tune), an end-to-end structural-semantic instruction tuning framework that synergizes encoder architecture with decoder-based LLMs through a projector module, where the assembly encoder extracts hardware-level structural features, the projector bridges representations with the semantic space, and the instruction-tuned LLM preserves natural language capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate three key advantages: (1) State-of-the-art performance in assembly comprehension with +39. 7% Recall@1 and +17. 8% MRR improvements over GPT-4-Turbo, (2) Consistent enhancements across base models (24. 6–107. 4% Recall@1 and 15. 2–106. 3% MRR on Qwen2. 5-Coder, Deepseek-Coder and CodeLlama variants), and (3) Superior instruction-following capabilities (41. 5%–118% improvements) with controlled code generation degradation (–8. 9% to –35% across architectures).