Jiacheng Yao

Boheng Sheng, Jiacheng Yao, Meicong Zhang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle to accurately read and comprehend extremely long texts. Current methods for improvement typically rely on splitting long contexts into fixed-length chunks. However, fixed truncation risks separating semantically relevant content, leading to ambiguity and compromising accurate understanding. To overcome this limitation, we propose a straightforward approach for dynamically separating and selecting chunks of long context, facilitating a more streamlined input for LLMs. In particular, we compute semantic similarities between adjacent sentences, using lower similarities to adaptively divide long contexts into variable-length chunks. We further train a question-aware classifier to select sensitive chunks that are critical for answering specific questions. Experimental results on both single-hop and multi-hop question-answering benchmarks show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms strong baselines. Notably, it maintains robustness across a wide range of input lengths, handling sequences of up to 256k tokens. Our datasets and code are available at the following link: https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/DCS

Jiajun Zhou, Jiacheng Yao, Xuanze Chen et al.

Lateral movement is a crucial component of advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks in networks. Attackers exploit security vulnerabilities in internal networks or IoT devices, expanding their control after initial infiltration to steal sensitive data or carry out other malicious activities, posing a serious threat to system security. Existing research suggests that attackers generally employ seemingly unrelated operations to mask their malicious intentions, thereby evading existing lateral movement detection methods and hiding their intrusion traces. In this regard, we analyze host authentication log data from a graph perspective and propose a multi-scale lateral movement detection framework called LMDetect. The main workflow of this framework proceeds as follows: 1) Construct a heterogeneous multigraph from host authentication log data to strengthen the correlations among internal system entities; 2) Design a time-aware subgraph generator to extract subgraphs centered on authentication events from the heterogeneous authentication multigraph; 3) Design a multi-scale attention encoder that leverages both local and global attention to capture hidden anomalous behavior patterns in the authentication subgraphs, thereby achieving lateral movement detection. Extensive experiments on two real-world authentication log datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our framework in detecting lateral movement behaviors.