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Main Authors: Wang, Tongze, Xie, Xiaohui, Wang, Wenduo, Wang, Chuyi, Liu, Jinzhou, Huang, Boyan, Hu, Yannan, Zhao, Youjian, Cui, Yong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21792
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author Wang, Tongze
Xie, Xiaohui
Wang, Wenduo
Wang, Chuyi
Liu, Jinzhou
Huang, Boyan
Hu, Yannan
Zhao, Youjian
Cui, Yong
author_facet Wang, Tongze
Xie, Xiaohui
Wang, Wenduo
Wang, Chuyi
Liu, Jinzhou
Huang, Boyan
Hu, Yannan
Zhao, Youjian
Cui, Yong
contents With the rapid growth of encrypted network traffic, effective traffic classification has become essential for network security and quality of service management. Current machine learning and deep learning approaches for traffic classification face three critical challenges: computational inefficiency of Transformer architectures, inadequate traffic representations with loss of crucial byte-level features while retaining detrimental biases, and poor handling of long-tail distributions in real-world data. We propose NetMamba+, a framework that addresses these challenges through three key innovations: (1) an efficient architecture considering Mamba and Flash Attention mechanisms, (2) a multimodal traffic representation scheme that preserves essential traffic information while eliminating biases, and (3) a label distribution-aware fine-tuning strategy. Evaluation experiments on massive datasets encompassing four main classification tasks showcase NetMamba+'s superior classification performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines, with improvements of up to 6.44\% in F1 score. Moreover, NetMamba+ demonstrates excellent efficiency, achieving 1.7x higher inference throughput than the best baseline while maintaining comparably low memory usage. Furthermore, NetMamba+ exhibits superior few-shot learning abilities, achieving better classification performance with fewer labeled data. Additionally, we implement an online traffic classification system that demonstrates robust real-world performance with a throughput of 261.87 Mb/s. As the first framework to adapt Mamba architecture for network traffic classification, NetMamba+ opens new possibilities for efficient and accurate traffic analysis in complex network environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_21792
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NetMamba+: A Framework of Pre-trained Models for Efficient and Accurate Network Traffic Classification
Wang, Tongze
Xie, Xiaohui
Wang, Wenduo
Wang, Chuyi
Liu, Jinzhou
Huang, Boyan
Hu, Yannan
Zhao, Youjian
Cui, Yong
Machine Learning
With the rapid growth of encrypted network traffic, effective traffic classification has become essential for network security and quality of service management. Current machine learning and deep learning approaches for traffic classification face three critical challenges: computational inefficiency of Transformer architectures, inadequate traffic representations with loss of crucial byte-level features while retaining detrimental biases, and poor handling of long-tail distributions in real-world data. We propose NetMamba+, a framework that addresses these challenges through three key innovations: (1) an efficient architecture considering Mamba and Flash Attention mechanisms, (2) a multimodal traffic representation scheme that preserves essential traffic information while eliminating biases, and (3) a label distribution-aware fine-tuning strategy. Evaluation experiments on massive datasets encompassing four main classification tasks showcase NetMamba+'s superior classification performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines, with improvements of up to 6.44\% in F1 score. Moreover, NetMamba+ demonstrates excellent efficiency, achieving 1.7x higher inference throughput than the best baseline while maintaining comparably low memory usage. Furthermore, NetMamba+ exhibits superior few-shot learning abilities, achieving better classification performance with fewer labeled data. Additionally, we implement an online traffic classification system that demonstrates robust real-world performance with a throughput of 261.87 Mb/s. As the first framework to adapt Mamba architecture for network traffic classification, NetMamba+ opens new possibilities for efficient and accurate traffic analysis in complex network environments.
title NetMamba+: A Framework of Pre-trained Models for Efficient and Accurate Network Traffic Classification
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21792