2026 · Preprint

Humans vs. Machines: A Comparison With AI Agents in Software Reverse Engineering

Compares human and LLM-agent understanding and navigation on the same static reverse-engineering challenges, then studies how binary representations consume context windows.

Scope and limitations

Understanding is graded on two compact challenges; the separate 4,000-binary study measures context capacity, not task-solving accuracy. The interface is static IDA/MCP without dynamic execution, and prior exposure to challenge source remains an acknowledged validity threat.

Why it fits this collection

Informs tool-interface design, selective retrieval, and persistent analysis state for reverse-engineering agents.

Publication and review details

Venue
arXiv
Status
Preprint
Publication / posting date
October 10, 2026
Date source
arXiv v1 submission
First arXiv submission
October 10, 2026
arXiv
2610.14960
Reviewed arXiv version
v1

Recent preprint, with no confirmed conference venue or paper-specific public code link. arXiv marks its generated DOI as pending registration, so the canonical link is the arXiv record.

Sources reviewed

Source review only; experiments were not rerun for this collection. Cite the original authors using the linked paper or BibTeX.

Primary sources

  1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14960
  2. https://arxiv.org/html/2610.14960v1