用轻量生成模型合成网络流量,兼顾精度与效率。
Lightweight GenAI for Network Traffic Generation: Fidelity, Augmentation, and Classification
- 基于早期包头信息生成流量特征,仅需数百万参数。
- 在两个数据集上验证,生成流量保留时空特征且支持隐私保护训练。
- 适合数据少、算力有限的网络分类场景,尤其适合资源受限部署。
网络流量分类日益依赖数据驱动模型,但实际部署常受限于标注数据不足、隐私要求严格及采集代表性流量样本成本高。尽管流量生成可缓解数据稀缺问题,传统生成方法难以建模现代流量的复杂时序特性,且计算开销大。本文研究轻量级生成式人工智能(GenAI)架构用于实用的网络流量生成。不直接生成原始包字节或依赖大型基础模型,而是从早期包头信息中合成紧凑的流级流量表示,使基于Transformer、状态空间和扩散模型的生成器仅需数百万参数即可运行。提出模块化生成流水线,并从四个维度评估:(i)合成流量保真度,(ii)仅用合成数据训练以实现隐私保护的分类,(iii)低数据条件下数据增强效果,(iv)计算效率。在两个异构数据集上的实验表明,轻量级Transformer与状态空间模型能有效保留流量的静态与时序特性,为下游分类任务提供有效合成数据。其中,Transformer模型在保真度与效率之间取得最佳平衡,兼具高质量生成与适中计算开销。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Network Traffic Classification (NTC) increasingly relies on data-driven models, yet its practical deployment is often constrained by limited labeled data, strict privacy requirements, and the cost of collecting representative traffic traces. While Network Traffic Generation (NTG) provides an effective means to mitigate data scarcity, conventional generative methods struggle to model the complex temporal dynamics of modern traffic and often incur high computational costs. In this article, we investigate lightweight Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) architectures for practical NTG. Rather than generating raw packet bytes or relying on large foundation models, we synthesize compact flow-level traffic representations derived from early packet-header information, enabling transformer-based, state-space, and diffusion models with only a few million parameters. We present a modular GenAI pipeline for NTG and evaluate it along four complementary axes: (i) synthetic traffic fidelity, (ii) synthetic-only training for privacy-preserving NTC, (iii) data augmentation under low-data regimes, and (iv) computational efficiency. Experiments on two heterogeneous datasets show that lightweight transformer-based and state-space models preserve both static and temporal traffic characteristics, while providing useful synthetic data for downstream NTC. Among them, transformer-based models offer the best fidelity-efficiency trade-off, combining high-quality traffic generation with moderate computational overhead.
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