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Michele Guerra

Publications and source records attributed to Michele Guerra.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

A Queryable Graph-Based Security Analysis Framework for O-RAN

The Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) replaces vendor-locked RANs with a modular and interoperable architecture that fosters competition and accelerates innovation. With this openness comes increased complexity and a larger attack surface, making security a critical concern. Today, assessing O-RAN security requires manually cross-referencing dozens of specifications, vendor whitepapers, and academic studies, which is error-prone and static. In this paper, we present a graph-based framework that transforms this static corpus into a single, queryable database. Our graph representation contains over 350 nodes and more than 1,250 relationships, distilled from specifications, academic papers, open-source projects, and vulnerability databases. To keep this resource current, we integrate a hybrid data extraction pipeline that couples deterministic parsing of structured specifications with Large Language Model (LLM)-assisted extraction for evolving specifications and unstructured literature. Querying the graph reveals three actionable findings within our curated corpus: critical infrastructure such as the O-DU, SMO, and O-Cloud carries dozens of specification-level threats yet has little or no empirical coverage; memory-safety weaknesses account for 11 of the 21 CWE occurrences associated with the analyzed CVEs; and fuzzing uncovered 18 of the 20 CVEs attributed to research papers. We provide the database, pipeline, and queries as open-source artifacts.

cs.CR

Interpreting Temporal Graph Neural Networks with Koopman Theory

Spatiotemporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) have shown promising results in many domains, from forecasting to epidemiology. However, understanding the dynamics learned by these models and explaining their behaviour is significantly more difficult than for models that deal with static data. Inspired by Koopman theory, which allows a simple description of intricate, nonlinear dynamical systems, we introduce new explainability approaches for temporal graphs. Specifically, we present two methods to interpret the STGNN's decision process and identify the most relevant spatial and temporal patterns in the input for the task at hand. The first relies on dynamic mode decomposition (DMD), a Koopman-inspired dimensionality reduction method. The second relies on sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics (SINDy), a popular method for discovering governing equations of dynamical systems, which we use for the first time as a general tool for explainability. On semi-synthetic dissemination datasets, our methods correctly identify interpretable features such as the times at which infections occur and the infected nodes. We also validate the methods qualitatively on a real-world human motion dataset, where the explanations highlight the body parts most relevant for action recognition.

cs.LG

Probabilistic load forecasting with Reservoir Computing

Some applications of deep learning require not only to provide accurate results but also to quantify the amount of confidence in their prediction. The management of an electric power grid is one of these cases: to avoid risky scenarios, decision-makers need both precise and reliable forecasts of, for example, power loads. For this reason, point forecasts are not enough hence it is necessary to adopt methods that provide an uncertainty quantification. This work focuses on reservoir computing as the core time series forecasting method, due to its computational efficiency and effectiveness in predicting time series. While the RC literature mostly focused on point forecasting, this work explores the compatibility of some popular uncertainty quantification methods with the reservoir setting. Both Bayesian and deterministic approaches to uncertainty assessment are evaluated and compared in terms of their prediction accuracy, computational resource efficiency and reliability of the estimated uncertainty, based on a set of carefully chosen performance metrics.

cs.LG

Combining Stochastic Explainers and Subgraph Neural Networks can Increase Expressivity and Interpretability

Subgraph-enhanced graph neural networks (SGNN) can increase the expressive power of the standard message-passing framework. This model family represents each graph as a collection of subgraphs, generally extracted by random sampling or with hand-crafted heuristics. Our key observation is that by selecting "meaningful" subgraphs, besides improving the expressivity of a GNN, it is also possible to obtain interpretable results. For this purpose, we introduce a novel framework that jointly predicts the class of the graph and a set of explanatory sparse subgraphs, which can be analyzed to understand the decision process of the classifier. We compare the performance of our framework against standard subgraph extraction policies, like random node/edge deletion strategies. The subgraphs produced by our framework allow to achieve comparable performance in terms of accuracy, with the additional benefit of providing explanations.

cs.LG

Explainability in subgraphs-enhanced Graph Neural Networks

Recently, subgraphs-enhanced Graph Neural Networks (SGNNs) have been introduced to enhance the expressive power of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which was proved to be not higher than the 1-dimensional Weisfeiler-Leman isomorphism test. The new paradigm suggests using subgraphs extracted from the input graph to improve the model's expressiveness, but the additional complexity exacerbates an already challenging problem in GNNs: explaining their predictions. In this work, we adapt PGExplainer, one of the most recent explainers for GNNs, to SGNNs. The proposed explainer accounts for the contribution of all the different subgraphs and can produce a meaningful explanation that humans can interpret. The experiments that we performed both on real and synthetic datasets show that our framework is successful in explaining the decision process of an SGNN on graph classification tasks.

cs.LG