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Abstract
Malware evolves rapidly, forcing machine learning (ML)-based detectors to
adapt continuously. With antivirus vendors processing hundreds of thousands of
new samples daily, datasets can grow to billions of examples, making full
retraining impractical. Continual learning (CL) has emerged as a scalable
alternative, enabling incremental updates without full data access while
mitigating catastrophic forgetting. In this work, we analyze a critical yet
overlooked issue in this context: security regression. Unlike forgetting, which
manifests as a general performance drop on previously seen data, security
regression captures harmful prediction changes at the sample level, such as a
malware sample that was once correctly detected but evades detection after a
model update. Although often overlooked, regressions pose serious risks in
security-critical applications, as the silent reintroduction of previously
detected threats in the system may undermine users' trust in the whole updating
process. To address this issue, we formalize and quantify security regression
in CL-based malware detectors and propose a regression-aware penalty to
mitigate it. Specifically, we adapt Positive Congruent Training (PCT) to the CL
setting, preserving prior predictive behavior in a model-agnostic manner.
Experiments on the ELSA, Tesseract, and AZ-Class datasets show that our method
effectively reduces regression across different CL scenarios while maintaining
strong detection performance over time.