Detecting packed executables is a critical component of large-scale malware analysis and antivirus engine workflows, as it identifies samples that warrant computationally intensive dynamic unpacking to reveal concealed malicious behavior. Traditionally, packer detection techniques have relied on empirical features, such as high entropy or specific binary patterns. However, these empirical, feature-based methods are increasingly vulnerable to evasion by adversarial samples or unknown packers (e.g., low-entropy packers). Furthermore, the dependence on expert-crafted features poses challenges in sustaining and evolving these methods over time.

Wireless federated learning (FL) holds the potential of preserving data privacy and reducing network traffic congestion, thereby attracting much recent attention. Due to the fading nature of wireless channels, wireless FL suffers from the random delay in each uplink and downlink transmission. As a result, how to analyze the overall random delay of a FL task over wireless fading channels remains open. To solve this challenging problem, we present a saddle point approximation based approach to obtain the distribution of the delay caused by communication in wireless FL systems. In particular, we obtain the uplink delay distribution and the downlink delay distribution by Lugannani-Rice formula. The overall delay distribution is then obtained through the convolution of those two distributions and the generating function. Simulation results demonstrate that the theoretical results provide accurate characterizations for the empirical results, which corroborates the validity of the analysis in this paper.

Federated learning (FL) is a collaborative machine learning paradigm, which enables deep learning model training over a large volume of decentralized data residing in mobile devices without accessing clients’ private data. Driven by the ever increasing demand for model training of mobile applications or devices, a vast majority of FL tasks are implemented over wireless fading channels. Due to the time-varying nature of wireless channels, however, random delay occurs in both the uplink and downlink transmissions of FL. How to analyze the overall time consumption of a wireless FL task, or more specifically, a FL’s delay distribution, becomes a challenging but important open problem, especially for delay-sensitive model training. In this paper, we present a unified framework to calculate the approximate delay distributions of FL over arbitrary fading channels. Specifically, saddle point approximation, extreme value theory (EVT), and large deviation theory (LDT) are jointly exploited to find the approximate delay distribution along with its tail distribution, which characterizes the quality-of-service of a wireless FL system. Simulation results will demonstrate that our approximation method achieves a small approximation error, which vanishes with the increase of training accuracy.

Predicting the popularity of online contents especially videos has drawn a lot of attention recently, since successful prediction of popularity can benefit many practical applications such as recommender systems and proactive caching, and help optimize the advertisement strategies or balance the throughput in the network. In this paper, we formulate a popularity prediction problem and present an Attention-based Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) with Feature Embedding method (ALFE) to tackle the popularity prediction problem. Several features including publish time, follower count, and type of the video are considered and compared. Experiments on a real world dataset show that our method outperforms other competitive baselines from existing works in terms of prediction accuracy. The attention mechanism and feature embedding contribute to the improvement of accuracy. Among all the features, timestamp of popularity and video duration are shown to be the most informative ones, due to the regularity and periodicity of human daily activities.