CAM-Guided Saliency Cutout and Image-Based Malware Classification

arXiv:2608.11634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dropout regularization is commonly used to reduce overfitting by removing parts of a neural network during training. For Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), cutouts serve a somewhat analogous purpose. Cutouts can be implemented as data augmentation: the original training image is retained, and additional copies are created with regions removed. In this chapter, we test whether cutout placement can be improved by using High-Resolution Class Activation Mapping (HiResCAM). We compare four controlled training conditions: no cutout, standard random cutout, low-saliency cutout, and high-saliency cutout. We experiment using grayscale malware images from the RawMal-TF dataset (17 families with1,000 samples per family), and for comparison to natural images, we experiment with the well-known CIFAR-100 dataset. All experiments are based on ResNet18 with100 training epochs. For the cutout experiments, we test cutout areas of5%, 10%, 20%, and30%, and we consider~Min{4,8} augmented copies per original training image. The RawMal-TF results are slightly worse for all three cutout cases (random, high and low saliency) as compared to no cutouts. In contrast, our CIFAR-100 experimental results improve slightly under low-saliency cutout. These results suggest that the value of saliency-guided cutout is domain dependent, and that malware images should not be treated as equivalent to natural images.

Source: arXiv cs.CV | 2026-08-13