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Designing a reliable lateral movement detector using a graph foundation model

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Foundation models have recently emerged as a new paradigm in machine learning (ML). These models are pre-trained on large and diverse datasets and can subsequently be applied to various downstream tasks with little or no retraining. This allows people without advanced ML expertise to build ML applications, accelerating innovation across many fields. However, the adoption of foundation models in cybersecurity is hindered by their inability to efficiently process data such as network traffic captures or binary executables. The recent introduction of graph foundation models (GFMs) could make a significant difference, as graphs are well-suited to representing these types of data. We study the usability of GFMs in cybersecurity through the lens of one specific use case, namely lateral movement detection. Using a pre-trained GFM, we build a detector that reaches state-of-the-art performance without requiring any training on domain-specific data. This case study thus provides compelling evidence of the potential of GFMs for cybersecurity.


Large Language Models for Validating Network Protocol Parsers

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Network protocol parsers are essential for enabling correct and secure communication between devices. Bugs in these parsers can introduce critical vulnerabilities, including memory corruption, information leakage, and denial-of-service attacks. An intuitive way to assess parser correctness is to compare the implementation with its official protocol standard. However, this comparison is challenging because protocol standards are typically written in natural language, whereas implementations are in source code. Existing methods like model checking, fuzzing, and differential testing have been used to find parsing bugs, but they either require significant manual effort or ignore the protocol standards, limiting their ability to detect semantic violations. To enable more automated validation of parser implementations against protocol standards, we propose PARVAL, a multi-agent framework built on large language models (LLMs). PARVAL leverages the capabilities of LLMs to understand both natural language and code. It transforms both protocol standards and their implementations into a unified intermediate representation, referred to as format specifications, and performs a differential comparison to uncover inconsistencies. We evaluate PARVAL on the Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) protocol. Our experiments demonstrate that PARVAL successfully identifies inconsistencies between the implementation and its RFC standard, achieving a low false positive rate of 5.6%. PARVAL uncovers seven unique bugs, including five previously unknown issues.


Bounded and Uniform Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection for Graphs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Given the critical role of graphs in real-world applications and their high-security requirements, improving the ability of graph neural networks (GNNs) to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) data is an urgent research problem. The recent work GNNSAFE proposes a framework based on the aggregation of negative energy scores that significantly improves the performance of GNNs to detect node-level OOD data. However, our study finds that score aggregation among nodes is susceptible to extreme values due to the unboundedness of the negative energy scores and logit shifts, which severely limits the accuracy of GNNs in detecting node-level OOD data. In this paper, we propose NODESAFE: reducing the generation of extreme scores of nodes by adding two optimization terms that make the negative energy scores bounded and mitigate the logit shift. Experimental results show that our approach dramatically improves the ability of GNNs to detect OOD data at the node level, e.g., in detecting OOD data induced by Structure Manipulation, the metric of FPR95 (lower is better) in scenarios without (with) OOD data exposure are reduced from the current SOTA by 28.4% (22.7%).


Multi-Sensor Fusion-Based Mobile Manipulator Remote Control for Intelligent Smart Home Assistance

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper proposes a wearable-controlled mobile manipulator system for intelligent smart home assistance, integrating MEMS capacitive microphones, IMU sensors, vibration motors, and pressure feedback to enhance human-robot interaction. The wearable device captures forearm muscle activity and converts it into real-time control signals for mobile manipulation. The wearable device achieves an offline classification accuracy of 88.33\%\ across six distinct movement-force classes for hand gestures by using a CNN-LSTM model, while real-world experiments involving five participants yield a practical accuracy of 83.33\%\ with an average system response time of 1.2 seconds. In Human-Robot synergy in navigation and grasping tasks, the robot achieved a 98\%\ task success rate with an average trajectory deviation of only 3.6 cm. Finally, the wearable-controlled mobile manipulator system achieved a 93.3\%\ gripping success rate, a transfer success of 95.6\%\, and a full-task success rate of 91.1\%\ during object grasping and transfer tests, in which a total of 9 object-texture combinations were evaluated. These three experiments' results validate the effectiveness of MEMS-based wearable sensing combined with multi-sensor fusion for reliable and intuitive control of assistive robots in smart home scenarios.


Physical Reservoir Computing in Hook-Shaped Rover Wheel Spokes for Real-Time Terrain Identification

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Effective terrain detection in unknown environments is crucial for safe and efficient robotic navigation. Traditional methods often rely on computationally intensive data processing, requiring extensive onboard computational capacity and limiting real-time performance for rovers. This study presents a novel approach that combines physical reservoir computing with piezoelectric sensors embedded in rover wheel spokes for real-time terrain identification. By leveraging wheel dynamics, terrain-induced vibrations are transformed into high-dimensional features for machine learning-based classification. Experimental results show that strategically placing three sensors on the wheel spokes achieves 90$\%$ classification accuracy, which demonstrates the accuracy and feasibility of the proposed method. The experiment results also showed that the system can effectively distinguish known terrains and identify unknown terrains by analyzing their similarity to learned categories. This method provides a robust, low-power framework for real-time terrain classification and roughness estimation in unstructured environments, enhancing rover autonomy and adaptability.


Wearable-Derived Behavioral and Physiological Biomarkers for Classifying Unipolar and Bipolar Depression Severity

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

-- Depression is a complex mental disorder characterized by a diverse range of observable and measurable indicators that go beyond traditional subjective assessments. Recent research has increasingly focused on objective, passive, and continuous monitoring using wearable devices to gain more precise insights into the physiological and behavioral aspects of depression. However, most existing studies primarily distinguish between healthy and depressed individuals, adopting a binary classification that fails to capture the heterogeneity of depressive disorders. In this study, we leverage wearable devices to predict depression subtypes--specifically unipolar and bipolar depression--aiming to identify distinctive biomarkers that could enhance diagnostic precision and support personalized treatment strategies. T o this end, we introduce the CAL YPSO dataset, designed for non-invasive detection of depression subtypes and symptomatology through physiological and behavioral signals, including blood volume pulse, electro-dermal activity, body temperature, and three-axis acceleration. Additionally, we establish a benchmark on the dataset using well-known features and standard machine learning methods. Preliminary results indicate that features related to physical activity, extracted from accelerometer data, are the most effective in distinguishing between unipolar and bipolar depression, achieving an accuracy of 96.77%. T emperature-based features also showed high discriminative power, reaching an accuracy of 93.55%. I. INTRODUCTION Depression is a common psychiatric disorders affecting approximately 280 million people worldwide, accounting for 3.8% of the global population.


Advanced Deep Learning and Large Language Models: Comprehensive Insights for Cancer Detection

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The rapid advancement of deep learning (DL) has transformed healthcare, particularly in cancer detection and diagnosis. DL surpasses traditional machine learning and human accuracy, making it a critical tool for identifying diseases. Despite numerous reviews on DL in healthcare, a comprehensive analysis of its role in cancer detection remains limited. Existing studies focus on specific aspects, leaving gaps in understanding its broader impact. This paper addresses these gaps by reviewing advanced DL techniques, including transfer learning (TL), reinforcement learning (RL), federated learning (FL), Transformers, and large language models (LLMs). These approaches enhance accuracy, tackle data scarcity, and enable decentralized learning while maintaining data privacy. TL adapts pre-trained models to new datasets, improving performance with limited labeled data. RL optimizes diagnostic pathways and treatment strategies, while FL fosters collaborative model development without sharing sensitive data. Transformers and LLMs, traditionally used in natural language processing, are now applied to medical data for improved interpretability. Additionally, this review examines these techniques' efficiency in cancer diagnosis, addresses challenges like data imbalance, and proposes solutions. It serves as a resource for researchers and practitioners, providing insights into current trends and guiding future research in advanced DL for cancer detection.


Machine Learning Methods for Gene Regulatory Network Inference

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Proper regulation of gene expression is essential to ensure that genes are activated only when necessary and that their activity is properly controlled [3]. The regulation of gene expression is achieved through understanding the intricate interactions between genes and other molecules. In this effort, Gene Regulatory Networks have emerged as a strong tool[2]. Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) are complex systems that determine the development, differentiation, and function of cells and organisms, as well as their response to environmental stimuli [4][5]. GRNs consist of genes, transcription factors (TFs), microRNAs, and other regulatory molecules that interact with each other to control gene expression [6]. The regulatory interactions between these molecules can form complex networks that exhibit emergent properties, such as robustness and adaptability [7]. In its simplest form, a GRN is a network of genes and their regulatory interactions, which govern the expression of these genes in response to various cellular cues. It is worth noting that in this definition, a transcription factor (TF) is considered a special kind of gene that may regulate the expression of other non-TF or TF genes. Each gene in the network acts as a node, and the regulatory interactions between genes are represented by directed edges connecting these nodes[8].


Predicting BVD Re-emergence in Irish Cattle From Highly Imbalanced Herd-Level Data Using Machine Learning Algorithms

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Bovine Viral Diarrhoea (BVD) has been the focus of a successful eradication programme in Ireland, with the herd-level prevalence declining from 11.3% in 2013 to just 0.2% in 2023. As the country moves toward BVD freedom, the development of predictive models for targeted surveillance becomes increasingly important to mitigate the risk of disease re-emergence. In this study, we evaluate the performance of a range of machine learning algorithms, including binary classification and anomaly detection techniques, for predicting BVD-positive herds using highly imbalanced herd-level data. We conduct an extensive simulation study to assess model performance across varying sample sizes and class imbalance ratios, incorporating resampling, class weighting, and appropriate evaluation metrics (sensitivity, positive predictive value, F1-score and AUC values). Random forests and XGBoost models consistently outperformed other methods, with the random forest model achieving the highest sensitivity and AUC across scenarios, including real-world prediction of 2023 herd status, correctly identifying 219 of 250 positive herds while halving the number of herds that require compared to a blanket-testing strategy.


Long Range Navigator (LRN): Extending robot planning horizons beyond metric maps

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A robot navigating an outdoor environment with no prior knowledge of the space must rely on its local sensing to perceive its surroundings and plan. This can come in the form of a local metric map or local policy with some fixed horizon. Beyond that, there is a fog of unknown space marked with some fixed cost. A limited planning horizon can often result in myopic decisions leading the robot off course or worse, into very difficult terrain. Ideally, we would like the robot to have full knowledge that can be orders of magnitude larger than a local cost map. In practice, this is intractable due to sparse sensing information and often computationally expensive. In this work, we make a key observation that long-range navigation only necessitates identifying good frontier directions for planning instead of full map knowledge. To this end, we propose Long Range Navigator (LRN), that learns an intermediate affordance representation mapping high-dimensional camera images to `affordable' frontiers for planning, and then optimizing for maximum alignment with the desired goal. LRN notably is trained entirely on unlabeled ego-centric videos making it easy to scale and adapt to new platforms. Through extensive off-road experiments on Spot and a Big Vehicle, we find that augmenting existing navigation stacks with LRN reduces human interventions at test-time and leads to faster decision making indicating the relevance of LRN. https://personalrobotics.github.io/lrn