SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Wenbo Hou

Publications and source records attributed to Wenbo Hou.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

An Automated Framework for Extracting Reachable Attack Chains from Cyber Threat Intelligence Reports

Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) reports richly describe real-world attack processes, but their unstructured narratives cannot be directly used for automated attack-path reasoning. Existing CTI extraction methods focus on indicators, entities, or TTP labels without modeling the execution conditions and resulting states of each attack step, so the extracted knowledge supports neither state matching nor reachability analysis across multi-stage attack chains. This paper proposes an automated framework that extracts reachable attack chains by modeling each attack step as an attack unit of preconditions, an attack behavior, and postconditions. A multi-stage pipeline assisted by large language models (LLMs) extracts attack behavior skeletons, recovers their preconditions and postconditions, normalizes them into predefined predicates, and repairs broken dependencies; the resulting units are compiled into Datalog-style rules for attack-goal reachability reasoning. On a dataset of 20 CTI reports containing 334 human-validated annotated steps, our framework achieves higher annotated-step coverage than representative CTI extraction systems in recovering attack behaviors. Moreover, by explicitly generating preconditions and postconditions, it produces attack units that are more complete and consistent than those generated by end-to-end LLM baselines. On the extracted chains, Datalog inference reaches the specified attack goal in 19 of 20 reports, while backward search yields 34 attack paths under the generated rules. The source code and experimental artifacts are available in an anonymized repository. .

cs.CR

Rethinking Backdoor Adversarial Unlearning through the Lens of Catastrophic Forgetting in Continual Learning

Existing studies reveal that current backdoor defenses exhibit limited robustness and often fail against specific types of attacks. More concerningly, prevailing safety tuning strategies tend to provide only superficial safety protection, as they fall short of completely eliminating the backdoor effects. In this work, we present a novel formulation of backdoor learning and unlearning as a sequential, three-stage process from a continual learning perspective. Within this framework, we formally define complete backdoor unlearning and further derive the necessary conditions for achieving it based on the mechanism of catastrophic forgetting. Guided by these insights, we propose Blind Inversion-Backdoor Adversarial Unlearning (BI-BAU), which formulates the generation of adversarial examples satisfying the unlearning conditions as a blind inversion problem. We solve this by integrating the bi-level optimization process of adversarial training into an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm framework to optimize the maximum a posteriori (MAP) objective. Furthermore, BI-BAU is extended to untargeted adversarial scenarios with unknown target classes, as well as to multi-modal contrastive learning tasks, enhancing its applicability to real-world deployment scenarios where pre-trained models may be compromised. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method exhibits general applicability across a wide spectrum of backdoor attacks and can effectively and thoroughly eliminate the backdoor effects from a backdoor model.

cs.LG

SparseWorld-TC: Trajectory-Conditioned Sparse Occupancy World Model

This paper introduces a novel architecture for trajectory-conditioned forecasting of future 3D scene occupancy. In contrast to methods that rely on variational autoencoders (VAEs) to generate discrete occupancy tokens, which inherently limit representational capacity, our approach predicts multi-frame future occupancy in an end-to-end manner directly from raw image features. Inspired by the success of attention-based transformer architectures in foundational vision and language models such as GPT and VGGT, we employ a sparse occupancy representation that bypasses the intermediate bird's eye view (BEV) projection and its explicit geometric priors. This design allows the transformer to capture spatiotemporal dependencies more effectively. By avoiding both the finite-capacity constraint of discrete tokenization and the structural limitations of BEV representations, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes benchmark for 1-3 second occupancy forecasting, outperforming existing approaches by a significant margin. Furthermore, it demonstrates robust scene dynamics understanding, consistently delivering high accuracy under arbitrary future trajectory conditioning.

cs.CV

RMFA-Net: A Neural ISP for Real RAW to RGB Image Reconstruction

Deep learning-based ISP algorithms have demonstrated significant potential in raw2rgb reconstruction. However, existing networks have not fully considered the specific characteristics of raw data, such as black level and CFA, which can negatively impact texture and color if mishandled. Moreover, uneven exposure in raw data is also not considered carefully, leading to adverse effects on contrast and brightness. In this paper, we introduce RMFA-Net to tackle these problems. We perform implicit black level correction to mitigate color shifts in dim scenes. To preserve high-frequency information and prevent misalignment, we propose a novel Three-Channel-Split mode. To address the issue of uneven exposure, we designed an explicit tone mapping module based on the Retinex theory. We train and evaluate our models using the dataset released by the Mobile AI 2022 Learned Smartphone ISP Challenge. It is demonstrated that RMFA-Net outperforms previous algorithms, achieving a PSNR score of over 25 dB, surpassing the state-of-the-art by +1 dB. Furthermore, we developed a lightweight version, RMFANet-tiny, for engineering deployment while still maintaining strong performance, surpassing the SOTA by +0.5 dB.

eess.IV

Shape Robust Text Detection with Progressive Scale Expansion Network

Scene text detection has witnessed rapid progress especially with the recent development of convolutional neural networks. However, there still exists two challenges which prevent the algorithm into industry applications. On the one hand, most of the state-of-art algorithms require quadrangle bounding box which is in-accurate to locate the texts with arbitrary shape. On the other hand, two text instances which are close to each other may lead to a false detection which covers both instances. Traditionally, the segmentation-based approach can relieve the first problem but usually fail to solve the second challenge. To address these two challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel Progressive Scale Expansion Network (PSENet), which can precisely detect text instances with arbitrary shapes. More specifically, PSENet generates the different scale of kernels for each text instance, and gradually expands the minimal scale kernel to the text instance with the complete shape. Due to the fact that there are large geometrical margins among the minimal scale kernels, our method is effective to split the close text instances, making it easier to use segmentation-based methods to detect arbitrary-shaped text instances. Extensive experiments on CTW1500, Total-Text, ICDAR 2015 and ICDAR 2017 MLT validate the effectiveness of PSENet. Notably, on CTW1500, a dataset full of long curve texts, PSENet achieves a F-measure of 74.3% at 27 FPS, and our best F-measure (82.2%) outperforms state-of-art algorithms by 6.6%. The code will be released in the future.

cs.CV

DuBox: No-Prior Box Objection Detection via Residual Dual Scale Detectors

Traditional neural objection detection methods use multi-scale features that allow multiple detectors to perform detecting tasks independently and in parallel. At the same time, with the handling of the prior box, the algorithm's ability to deal with scale invariance is enhanced. However, too many prior boxes and independent detectors will increase the computational redundancy of the detection algorithm. In this study, we introduce Dubox, a new one-stage approach that detects the objects without prior box. Working with multi-scale features, the designed dual scale residual unit makes dual scale detectors no longer run independently. The second scale detector learns the residual of the first. Dubox has enhanced the capacity of heuristic-guided that can further enable the first scale detector to maximize the detection of small targets and the second to detect objects that cannot be identified by the first one. Besides, for each scale detector, with the new classification-regression progressive strapped loss makes our process not based on prior boxes. Integrating these strategies, our detection algorithm has achieved excellent performance in terms of speed and accuracy. Extensive experiments on the VOC, COCO object detection benchmark have confirmed the effectiveness of this algorithm.

cs.CV

Shape Robust Text Detection with Progressive Scale Expansion Network

The challenges of shape robust text detection lie in two aspects: 1) most existing quadrangular bounding box based detectors are difficult to locate texts with arbitrary shapes, which are hard to be enclosed perfectly in a rectangle; 2) most pixel-wise segmentation-based detectors may not separate the text instances that are very close to each other. To address these problems, we propose a novel Progressive Scale Expansion Network (PSENet), designed as a segmentation-based detector with multiple predictions for each text instance. These predictions correspond to different `kernels' produced by shrinking the original text instance into various scales. Consequently, the final detection can be conducted through our progressive scale expansion algorithm which gradually expands the kernels with minimal scales to the text instances with maximal and complete shapes. Due to the fact that there are large geometrical margins among these minimal kernels, our method is effective to distinguish the adjacent text instances and is robust to arbitrary shapes. The state-of-the-art results on ICDAR 2015 and ICDAR 2017 MLT benchmarks further confirm the great effectiveness of PSENet. Notably, PSENet outperforms the previous best record by absolute 6.37\% on the curve text dataset SCUT-CTW1500. Code will be available in https://github.com/whai362/PSENet.

cs.CV