it is a fact that every ELF binary starts with more or less the same stuff. and don't even get me started on the petabytes of space lost to storing eight quintillion copies of This program cannot be run in DOS mode. in circa every COFF binary. all that shit can be thrown away entirely.
it is also a fact that pretty much every program uses the same couple dozen opcodes (Euh et al., 2020). we can optimise for the most common ones. we don't need to store xor eax,eax because nobody's ever gonna xor the eax register with anything else. in the same way that taking a weird photo will produce JPEG artifacts, weird opcodes will result in decompression artifacts (aka "corrupt data"). this is uncommon enough that we don't care about it happening.
we'll hardcode a list of common constants and extract them from the binary. it takes EIGHT BYTES to store a double precision float representation of pi, and it's always the same number!! any binary containing bytes that look anything like a representation of 3.14 can be merged. ditto for tau, euler's constant, INT_MAX, etc.
Euh, S., Lee, H., Kim, D., & Hwang, D. (2020). Comparative Analysis of Low-Dimensional Features and Tree-Based Ensembles for Malware Detection Systems. IEEE Access, 8, 76796–76808. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2986014