Mean Masked Autoencoder with Flow-Mixing for Encrypted Traffic Classification
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arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866914434388066304 |
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| author | Liu, Xiao Fu, Xiaowei Huang, Fuxiang Zhang, Lei |
| author_facet | Liu, Xiao Fu, Xiaowei Huang, Fuxiang Zhang, Lei |
| contents | Network traffic classification using self-supervised pre-training models based on Masked Autoencoders (MAE) has demonstrated a huge potential. However, existing methods are confined to isolated byte-level reconstruction of individual flows, lacking adequate perception of the multi-granularity contextual relationship in traffic. To address this limitation, we propose Mean MAE (MMAE), a teacher-student MAE paradigm with flow mixing strategy for building encrypted traffic pre-training model. MMAE employs a self-distillation mechanism for teacher-student interaction, where the teacher provides unmasked flow-level semantic supervision to advance the student from local byte reconstruction to multi-granularity comprehension. To break the information bottleneck in individual flows, we introduce a dynamic Flow Mixing (FlowMix) strategy to replace traditional random masking mechanism. By constructing challenging cross-flow mixed samples with interferences, it compels the model to learn discriminative representations from distorted tokens. Furthermore, we design a Packet-importance aware Mask Predictor (PMP) equipped with an attention bias mechanism that leverages packet-level side-channel statistics to dynamically mask tokens with high semantic density. Numerous experiments on a number of datasets covering encrypted applications, malware, and attack traffic demonstrate that MMAE achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/lx6c78/MMAE |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_29537 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Mean Masked Autoencoder with Flow-Mixing for Encrypted Traffic Classification Liu, Xiao Fu, Xiaowei Huang, Fuxiang Zhang, Lei Cryptography and Security Artificial Intelligence Multimedia Networking and Internet Architecture Network traffic classification using self-supervised pre-training models based on Masked Autoencoders (MAE) has demonstrated a huge potential. However, existing methods are confined to isolated byte-level reconstruction of individual flows, lacking adequate perception of the multi-granularity contextual relationship in traffic. To address this limitation, we propose Mean MAE (MMAE), a teacher-student MAE paradigm with flow mixing strategy for building encrypted traffic pre-training model. MMAE employs a self-distillation mechanism for teacher-student interaction, where the teacher provides unmasked flow-level semantic supervision to advance the student from local byte reconstruction to multi-granularity comprehension. To break the information bottleneck in individual flows, we introduce a dynamic Flow Mixing (FlowMix) strategy to replace traditional random masking mechanism. By constructing challenging cross-flow mixed samples with interferences, it compels the model to learn discriminative representations from distorted tokens. Furthermore, we design a Packet-importance aware Mask Predictor (PMP) equipped with an attention bias mechanism that leverages packet-level side-channel statistics to dynamically mask tokens with high semantic density. Numerous experiments on a number of datasets covering encrypted applications, malware, and attack traffic demonstrate that MMAE achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/lx6c78/MMAE |
| title | Mean Masked Autoencoder with Flow-Mixing for Encrypted Traffic Classification |
| topic | Cryptography and Security Artificial Intelligence Multimedia Networking and Internet Architecture |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29537 |