Malware detection is an interesting and valuable domain to work in because it has significant real-world impact and unique machine-learning challenges. We investigate existing long-range techniques and benchmarks and find that they’re not very suitable in this problem area. In this paper, we introduce Holographic Global Convolutional Networks (HGConv) that utilize the properties of Holographic Reduced Representations (HRR) to encode and decode features from sequence elements. Unlike other global convolutional methods, our method does not require any intricate kernel computation or crafted kernel design. HGConv kernels are defined as simple parameters learned through backpropagation. The proposed method has achieved new SOTA results on Microsoft Malware Classification Challenge, Drebin, and EMBER malware benchmarks. With log-linear complexity in sequence length, the empirical results demonstrate substantially faster run-time by HGConv compared to other methods achieving far more efficient scaling even with sequence length $\geq 100,000$.

Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) are one approach to developing Neuro-symbolic AI, where two vectors in $\mathbb{R}^d$ are 'bound' together to produce a new vector in the same space. VSAs support the commutativity and associativity of this binding operation, along with an inverse operation, allowing one to construct symbolic-style manipulations over real-valued vectors. Most VSAs were developed before deep learning and automatic differentiation became popular and instead focused on efficacy in hand-designed systems. In this work, we introduce the Hadamard-derived linear Binding (HLB), which is designed to have favorable computational efficiency, and efficacy in classic VSA tasks, and perform well in differentiable systems.

In recent years, self-attention has become the dominant paradigm for sequence modeling in a variety of domains. However, in domains with very long sequence lengths the $\mathcal{O}(T^2)$ memory and $\mathcal{O}(T^2 H)$ compute costs can make using transformers infeasible. Motivated by problems in malware detection, where sequence lengths of $T \geq 100,000$ are a roadblock to deep learning, we re-cast self-attention using the neuro-symbolic approach of Holographic Reduced Representations (HRR). In doing so we perform the same high-level strategy of the standard self-attention: a set of queries matching against a set of keys, and returning a weighted response of the values for each key. Implemented as a ``Hrrformer'' we obtain several benefits including $\mathcal{O}(T H \log H)$ time complexity, $\mathcal{O}(T H)$ space complexity, and convergence in $10\times$ fewer epochs. Nevertheless, the Hrrformer achieves near state-of-the-art accuracy on LRA benchmarks and we are able to learn with just a single layer. Combined, these benefits make our Hrrformer the first viable Transformer for such long malware classification sequences and up to $280\times$ faster to train on the Long Range Arena benchmark.

Due to the computational cost of running inference for a neural network, the need to deploy the inferential steps on a third party’s compute environment or hardware is common. If the third party is not fully trusted, it is desirable to obfuscate the nature of the inputs and outputs, so that the third party can not easily determine what specific task is being performed. Provably secure protocols for leveraging an untrusted party exist but are too computational demanding to run in practice. We instead explore a different strategy of fast, heuristic security that we call Connectionist Symbolic Pseudo Secrets. By leveraging Holographic Reduced Representations (HRRs), we create a neural network with a pseudo-encryption style defense that empirically shows robustness to attack, even under threat models that unrealistically favor the adversary.

Interactions with virtual 3D objects in the virtual reality (VR) environment using the gesture of fingers captured in a wearable 2D camera have emerging applications in real-life. This paper presents an approach of a two-stage convolutional neural network, one for the detection of hand and another for the fingertips. One purpose of VR environments is to transform a virtual 3D object with affine parameters by using the gesture of thumb and index fingers. To evaluate the performance of the proposed system, one existing, and another developed egocentric fingertip databases are employed so that learning involves large variations that are common in real-life. Experimental results show that the proposed fingertip detection system outperforms the existing systems in terms of the precision of detection. The interaction performance of the proposed system in the VR environment is higher than that of the existing systems in terms of estimation error and correlation between the ground truth and estimated affine parameters.

This paper presents an approach of two-stage convolutional neural network (CNN) for detection of fingertips so that an interaction of the fingertips with a 3D object in the virtual environment (VR) can be established. The first-stage CNN is assigned to detect and locate the hand. Subsequently, the detected hand is cropped, resized, and fed to the second stage CNN for predicting the coordinates of fingertips. Next, a tracker is employed to track the hand continuously so that the system becomes reliable in real-time performance. The VR environments are designed to demonstrate the performance of the fingertip-based interaction system. The proposed method focuses on the geometric transformation of a virtual 3D object by using the gesture of the thumb and index finger. In particular, the distance of the thumb and index fingertips is employed to scale a 3D object in virtual environment. To realize the system, a dataset of 1000 images, named, Thumb Index 1000 (TI1K) dataset, is developed including those variations that are commonly-seen in real-life thumb and index fingers. The system is evaluated with the aid of a number of participants and virtual objects that are distinctive in nature. The proposed approach attains the desired goal and performs in real-time seamlessly to facilitate the human-computer interaction in the VR environment.