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LLMs Have Rhythm: Fingerprinting Large Language Models Using Inter-Token Times and Network Traffic Analysis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into many technological ecosystems across various domains and industries, identifying which model is deployed or being interacted with is critical for the security and trustworthiness of the systems. Current verification methods typically rely on analyzing the generated output to determine the source model. However, these techniques are susceptible to adversarial attacks, operate in a post-hoc manner, and may require access to the model weights to inject a verifiable fingerprint. In this paper, we propose a novel passive and non-invasive fingerprinting technique that operates in real-time and remains effective even under encrypted network traffic conditions. Our method leverages the intrinsic autoregressive generation nature of language models, which generate text one token at a time based on all previously generated tokens, creating a unique temporal pattern like a rhythm or heartbeat that persists even when the output is streamed over a network. We find that measuring the Inter-Token Times (ITTs)-time intervals between consecutive tokens-can identify different language models with high accuracy. We develop a Deep Learning (DL) pipeline to capture these timing patterns using network traffic analysis and evaluate it on 16 Small Language Models (SLMs) and 10 proprietary LLMs across different deployment scenarios, including local host machine (GPU/CPU), Local Area Network (LAN), Remote Network, and Virtual Private Network (VPN). The experimental results confirm that our proposed technique is effective and maintains high accuracy even when tested in different network conditions. This work opens a new avenue for model identification in real-world scenarios and contributes to more secure and trustworthy language model deployment.


AutoBS: Autonomous Base Station Deployment Framework with Reinforcement Learning and Digital Twin Network

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--This paper introduces AutoBS, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework for optimal base station (BS) deployment in 6G networks. AutoBS leverages the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm and fast, site-specific pathloss predictions from PMNet to efficiently learn deployment strategies that balance coverage and capacity. Numerical results demonstrate that AutoBS achieves 95% for a single BS, and 90% for multiple BSs, of the capacity provided by exhaustive search methods while reducing inference time from hours to milliseconds, making it highly suitable for real-time applications. AutoBS offers a scalable and automated solution for large-scale 6G networks, addressing the challenges of dynamic environments with minimal computational overhead. I NTRODUCTION The rollout of 6G networks demands higher base station (BS) density due to the use of higher frequencies like millimeter-wave (mmWave), which offers enhanced bandwidth and low latency. However, these frequencies suffer from severe signal attenuation and limited propagation range, particularly in complex urban environments. As a result, dense BS deployment becomes essential to maintain reliable coverage and capacity.


Exponential Topology-enabled Scalable Communication in Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), well-designed communication protocols can effectively facilitate consensus among agents, thereby enhancing task performance. Moreover, in large-scale multi-agent systems commonly found in real-world applications, effective communication plays an even more critical role due to the escalated challenge of partial observability compared to smaller-scale setups. In this work, we endeavor to develop a scalable communication protocol for MARL. Unlike previous methods that focus on selecting optimal pairwise communication links-a task that becomes increasingly complex as the number of agents grows-we adopt a global perspective on communication topology design. Specifically, we propose utilizing the exponential topology to enable rapid information dissemination among agents by leveraging its small-diameter and small-size properties. This approach leads to a scalable communication protocol, named ExpoComm. To fully unlock the potential of exponential graphs as communication topologies, we employ memory-based message processors and auxiliary tasks to ground messages, ensuring that they reflect global information and benefit decision-making. Extensive experiments on large-scale cooperative benchmarks, including MAgent and Infrastructure Management Planning, demonstrate the superior performance and robust zero-shot transferability of ExpoComm compared to existing communication strategies. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/LXXXXR/ExpoComm.


Improving customer service with automatic topic detection in user emails

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This study introduces a novel Natural Language Processing pipeline that enhances customer service efficiency at Telekom Srbija, a leading Serbian telecommunications company, through automated email topic detection and labelling. Central to the pipeline is BERTopic, a modular architecture that allows unsupervised topic modelling. After a series of preprocessing and post-processing steps, we assign one of 12 topics and several additional labels to incoming emails, allowing customer service to filter and access them through a custom-made application. The model's performance was evaluated by assessing the speed and correctness of the automatically assigned topics across a test dataset of 100 customer emails. The pipeline shows broad applicability across languages, particularly for those that are low-resourced and morphologically rich. The system now operates in the company's production environment, streamlining customer service operations through automated email classification.


Evaluation of Missing Data Imputation for Time Series Without Ground Truth

arXiv.org Machine Learning

--The challenge of handling missing data in time series is critical for maintaining the accuracy and reliability of machine learning (ML) models in applications like fifth generation mobile communication (5G) network management. Traditional methods for validating imputation rely on ground truth data, which is inherently unavailable. This paper addresses this limitation by introducing two statistical metrics, the wasserstein distance (WD) and jensen-shannon divergence (JSD), to evaluate imputation quality without requiring ground truth. These metrics assess the alignment between the distributions of imputed and original data, providing a robust method for evaluating imputation performance based on internal structure and data consistency. We apply and test these metrics across several imputation techniques. Results demonstrate that WD and JSD are effective metrics for assessing the quality of missing data imputation, particularly in scenarios where ground truth data is unavailable.


Enhancing 5G O-RAN Communication Efficiency Through AI-Based Latency Forecasting

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--The increasing complexity and dynamic nature of 5G open radio access networks (O-RAN) pose significant challenges to maintaining low latency, high throughput, and resource efficiency. While existing methods leverage machine learning for latency prediction and resource management, they often lack real-world scalability and hardware validation. This paper addresses these limitations by presenting an artificial intelligence-driven latency forecasting system integrated into a functional O-RAN prototype. The system uses a bidirectional long short-term memory model to predict latency in real time within a scalable, open-source framework built with FlexRIC. Experimental results demonstrate the model's efficacy, achieving a loss metric below 0.04, thus validating its applicability in dynamic 5G environments.


Provable Performance Bounds for Digital Twin-driven Deep Reinforcement Learning in Wireless Networks: A Novel Digital-Twin Bisimulation Metric

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--Digital twin (DT)-driven deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for wireless network optimization, offering safe and efficient training environment for policy exploration. However, in theory existing methods cannot always guarantee real-world performance of DT - trained policies before actual deployment, due to the absence of a universal metric for assessing DT's ability to support reliable DRL training transferrable to physical networks. In this paper, we propose the DT bisimulation metric (DT -BSM), a novel metric based on the Wasserstein distance, to quantify the discrepancy between Markov decision processes (MDPs) in both the DT and the corresponding real-world wireless network environment. We prove that for any DT -trained policy, the sub-optimality of its performance (regret) in the real-world deployment is bounded by a weighted sum of the DT -BSM and its sub-optimality within the MDP in the DT . Then, a modified DT -BSM based on the total variation distance is also introduced to avoid the prohibitive calculation complexity of Wasserstein distance for large-scale wireless network scenarios. Further, to tackle the challenge of obtaining accurate transition probabilities of the MDP in real world for the DT -BSM calculation, we propose an empirical DT - BSM method based on statistical sampling. We prove that the empirical DT -BSM always converges to the desired theoretical one, and quantitatively establish the relationship between the required sample size and the target level of approximation accuracy. Index T erms --Digital twin, Markov decision process (MDP), deep reinforcement learning (DRL), transfer learning, bisimula-tion metric. HE long-term evolution of cellular networks, marked by growing scale, density, and heterogeneity, substantially increases the difficulty of wireless network optimization [1]. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) emerges as a promising solution for tackling extensive state and action spaces and nonconvex optimization problems. It has been successfully applied to various network optimization tasks, such as admission control [2], resource allocation [3], node selection [4], and task offloading [5] in wireless networks. Z. Tao, W . Xu, and X. Y ou are with the National Mobile Communications Research Lab, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China, and also with the Pervasive Communication Research Center, Purple Mountain Laboratories, Nanjing 211111, China (email: {zhenyu tao, wxu, xhyu }@seu.edu.cn). To overcome these issues, the concept of digital twin (DT) has been introduced [7].


Atten-Transformer: A Deep Learning Framework for User App Usage Prediction

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Accurately predicting smartphone app usage patterns is crucial for user experience optimization and targeted marketing. However, existing methods struggle to capture intricate dependencies in user behavior, particularly in sparse or complex usage scenarios. To address these challenges, we introduce Atten-Transformer, a novel model that integrates temporal attention with a Transformer network to dynamically identify and leverage key app usage patterns. Unlike conventional methods that primarily consider app order and duration, our approach employs a multi-dimensional feature representation, incorporating both feature encoding and temporal encoding to enhance predictive accuracy. The proposed attention mechanism effectively assigns importance to critical app usage moments, improving both model interpretability and generalization. Extensive experiments on multiple smartphone usage datasets, including LSapp and Tsinghua App Usage datasets, demonstrate that Atten-Transformer consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models across different data splits. Specifically, our model achieves a 45.24\% improvement in HR@1 on the Tsinghua dataset (Time-based Split) and a 18.25\% improvement in HR@1 on the LSapp dataset (Cold Start Split), showcasing its robustness across diverse app usage scenarios. These findings highlight the potential of integrating adaptive attention mechanisms in mobile usage forecasting, paving the way for enhanced user engagement and resource allocation.


Using Machine Learning to Detect Fraudulent SMSs in Chichewa

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

SMS enabled fraud is of great concern globally. Building classifiers based on machine learning for SMS fraud requires the use of suitable datasets for model training and validation. Most research has centred on the use of datasets of SMSs in English. This paper introduces a first dataset for SMS fraud detection in Chichewa, a major language in Africa, and reports on experiments with machine learning algorithms for classifying SMSs in Chichewa as fraud or non-fraud. We answer the broader research question of how feasible it is to develop machine learning classification models for Chichewa SMSs. To do that, we created three datasets. A small dataset of SMS in Chichewa was collected through primary research from a segment of the young population. We applied a label-preserving text transformations to increase its size. The enlarged dataset was translated into English using two approaches: human translation and machine translation. The Chichewa and the translated datasets were subjected to machine classification using random forest and logistic regression. Our findings indicate that both models achieved a promising accuracy of over 96% on the Chichewa dataset. There was a drop in performance when moving from the Chichewa to the translated dataset. This highlights the importance of data preprocessing, especially in multilingual or cross-lingual NLP tasks, and shows the challenges of relying on machine-translated text for training machine learning models. Our results underscore the importance of developing language specific models for SMS fraud detection to optimise accuracy and performance. Since most machine learning models require data preprocessing, it is essential to investigate the impact of the reliance on English-specific tools for data preprocessing.


Toward Agentic AI: Generative Information Retrieval Inspired Intelligent Communications and Networking

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The increasing complexity and scale of modern telecommunications networks demand intelligent automation to enhance efficiency, adaptability, and resilience. Agentic AI has emerged as a key paradigm for intelligent communications and networking, enabling AI-driven agents to perceive, reason, decide, and act within dynamic networking environments. However, effective decision-making in telecom applications, such as network planning, management, and resource allocation, requires integrating retrieval mechanisms that support multi-hop reasoning, historical cross-referencing, and compliance with evolving 3GPP standards. This article presents a forward-looking perspective on generative information retrieval-inspired intelligent communications and networking, emphasizing the role of knowledge acquisition, processing, and retrieval in agentic AI for telecom systems. We first provide a comprehensive review of generative information retrieval strategies, including traditional retrieval, hybrid retrieval, semantic retrieval, knowledge-based retrieval, and agentic contextual retrieval. We then analyze their advantages, limitations, and suitability for various networking scenarios. Next, we present a survey about their applications in communications and networking. Additionally, we introduce an agentic contextual retrieval framework to enhance telecom-specific planning by integrating multi-source retrieval, structured reasoning, and self-reflective validation. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves answer accuracy, explanation consistency, and retrieval efficiency compared to traditional and semantic retrieval methods. Finally, we outline future research directions.