This paper studies the network dismantling (ND) problem and aims to develop more effective models and approaches to cope with it, such that a given network can be dismantled by a set of vital nodes of minimum size. To achieve that, we propose a three-phase framework—the Percolation coarsening, Belief propagation dismantling, and Fragmentation optimization fine-tuning (PBF) framework—consisting of PBF-I, PBF-II, and PBF-III, where we contribute three new and one improved algorithms. In particular, PBF-I studies strategies to effectively coarsen the studied network via the merger of less influential nodes, such that the computational efficiency of the follow-up PBF-II phase can be maximized. PBF-II considers the superiority of the belief propagation (BP) algorithm in the ND problem and proposes an improved BP to identify vital nodes from the coarse-grained network, which particularly focuses on the largest connected component and obtains the vital nodes from a filtered candidate set. In addition, PBF-III presents fine-tuning strategies to further improve the quality of solutions obtained in PBF-II. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated on over 10 empirical networks in regard to varied circumstances. Our results show that the developed framework can obtain dismantling node sets of much smaller sizes compared to the state-of-the-art in almost all cases. Meanwhile, our framework is also more effective, efficient, and stable compared to existing methods, and is capable of tackling the ND problem in extremely large networks. We are convinced that the model and methodology introduced in this paper could be applied to many applications, such as the robustness and resilience analysis of network-structural infrastructures, the suppression of epidemics, and the containment of misinformation on social networks. The source code of the proposed PBF framework will be made publicly available upon acceptance of the manuscript.

Accurate infectious disease forecasting is crucial for effective public health decision-making. Spatio-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) provide new insights and effective strategies for epidemic forecasting by modeling the spatio-temporal dynamics of disease transmission. However, most existing methods typically rely on fine-grained mobility and additional epidemiological information beyond reported infection cases, which are seldom accessible or practical to obtain in realworld scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose the Epidemiology-informed Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Graph neural network (EASTG), a novel forecasting framework requiring only reported infection cases. To model latent transmission dynamics, EASTG proposes an adaptive graph learning mechanism to capture both stable structural information and time-varying inter-regional dependencies directly from surveillance data. Then, a dual-stream temporal module is adopted to decompose and learn the trend and seasonal patterns inherent in epidemic time series. Furthermore, we introduce an epidemiology-informed next-generation matrix approach, which combines domain knowledge with an adaptive graph to model multi-regional epidemic transmission dynamics. Extensive experiments on three realworld datasets show that EASTG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models. Our findings provide a practical solution for epidemic intelligence, offering reliable and meaningful forecasting even under data-constrained conditions.

The Multi-Task Learning (MTL) technique has been widely studied by worldwide researchers. The majority of current MTL studies adopt the hard parameter sharing structure, where hard layers tend to learn general representations over all tasks and specific layers are prone to learn specific representations for each task. Since the specific layers directly follow the hard layers, the MTL model needs to estimate this direct change (from general to specific) as well. To alleviate this problem, we introduce the novel cluster layer, which groups tasks into clusters during training procedures. In a cluster layer, the tasks in the same cluster are further required to share the same network. By this way, the cluster layer produces the general presentation for the same cluster, while produces relatively specific presentations for different clusters. The cluster layers are used as transitions between the hard layers and the specific layers. Thus, the MTL model can learn general representations to specific representations gradually. We evaluate our model with MTL document classification, and the results demonstrate the cluster layer is quite efficient in MTL.

Fact verification task has emerged as an essential research topic recently due to abundant fake news spreading on the Internet. The task based on unstructured data (i.e., news) has achieved great development, but the task based on structured data (i.e., table) is still in the primary development period. The existing methods usually construct complete heterogeneous graph networks around statement, table, and program subgraphs, and then infer to learn similar semantics on them for fact verification. However, they generally connect the nodes with the same content between subgraphs directly to frame a larger graph network, which has serious sparsity in connections, especially when subgraphs possess limited semantics. To this end, we propose tight-fitting graph inference network (TFGIN), which innovatively builds tight-fitting graphs (TF-graphs) to strengthen the connections of subgraphs and designs inference modeling layer (IML) to learn coherence evidence for fact verification. Specifically, different from traditional connection ways, the constructed TF-graph enhances inter-graph and intra-graph connections of subgraphs through subgraph segmentation and interaction guidance mechanisms. IML could reason the semantics with strong correlation and high consistency as explainable evidence. Experiments on three competitive datasets confirm the superiority and scalability of our TFGIN.

Recently, the autoregressive framework based on large language models (LLMs) has achieved excellent performance in controlling the generated text to adhere to the required style. These methods guide LLMs through prompt learning to generate target text in an autoregressive manner. However, this manner possesses lower controllability and suffers from the challenge of accumulating errors, where early prediction inaccuracies might influence subsequent word generation. Furthermore, existing prompt-based methods overlook specific region editing, resulting in a deficiency of localized control over input text. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel three-stage prompt-based approach for specific region editing. To alleviate the issue of accumulating errors, we transform the text style transfer task into a text infilling task, guiding the LLMs to modify only a small portion of text within the editing region to achieve style transfer, thus reducing the number of autoregressive iterations. To achieve an effective specific editing region, we adopt both prompt-based and word frequency-based strategies for region selection, subsequently employing a discriminator to validate the efficacy of the selected region. Experiments conducted on several publicly competitive datasets for text style transfer task confirm that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. Keywords: text style transfer, natural language generation, large language models

In recent years, machine learning has made tremendous progress in the fields of computer vision, natural language processing, and cybersecurity; however, we cannot ignore that machine learning models are vulnerable to adversarial examples, with some minor malicious input modifications, while appearing unmodified to human observers, the outputs of machine learning-based model can be misled easily. Likewise, attackers can bypass machine-learning-based security defenses model to attack systems in real time by generating adversarial examples. In this paper, we propose a black-box attack method against machine-learning-based anomaly network flow detection algorithms. Our attack strategy consists in training another model to substitute for the target machine learning model. Based on the overall understanding of the substitute model and the migration of the adversarial examples, we use the substitute model to craft adversarial examples. The experiment has shown that our method can attack the target model effectively. We attack several kinds of network flow detection models, which are based on different kinds of machine learning methods, and we find that the adversarial examples crafted by our method can bypass the detection of the target model with high probability.

Proactive defense is one of the most promising approaches to enhance cyber-security in the power systems, while how to balance its costs and benefits has not been fully studied. This paper proposes a novel method to model cyber adversarial behaviors as attackers contending for the defenders’ benefit based on the game theory. We firstly calculate the final benefit of the hackers and defenders in different states on the basis of the constructed models and then predict the possible attack behavior and evaluate the best defense strategy for the power systems. Based on a real power system subnet, we analyze 27 attack models with our method, and the result shows that the optimal strategy of the attacker is to launch a small-scale attack. Correspondingly, the optimal strategy of the defender is to conduct partial-defense.