Lun Li

Rongye Ye, Lun Li, Zheng Luo et al.

Metagenomic taxonomic annotation aims to identify the microbial origins of DNA fragments in environmental samples. Traditional methods that rely on sequence similarity are often constrained by the high microbial diversity and the incompleteness of reference databases, which has motivated the development of learning approaches such as Taxometer that perform post hoc correction to learn more informative metagenomic sequence representations. However, these methods typically rely on labels derived from similarity search tools during training, which inevitably introduces noise that can impair representation learning and degrade classification performance. To address this issue, we propose TaxDistill, a knowledge distillation framework for metagenomic classification. We introduce GenomeOcean, a 500M parameter genomic foundation model, as the teacher network to extract deep semantic features and generate soft labels based on confidence. By distilling this soft label information into a lightweight student network, TaxDistill effectively reduces the label noise introduced by initial retrieval tools. Comprehensive experiments on seven diverse CAMI2 datasets demonstrate that TaxDistill outperforms existing baselines in most scenarios. For instance, on the Gastrointestinal dataset, it improves the F1 score of MMseqs2 from 0.763 to 0.941, outperforming the Taxometer baseline. Overall, TaxDistill provides a reliable method for label correction in complex metagenomic analysis.

Jie Zhang, Haoyu Bu, Hui Wen et al.

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has opened new avenues across various fields, including cybersecurity, which faces an evolving threat landscape and demand for innovative technologies. Despite initial explorations into the application of LLMs in cybersecurity, there is a lack of a comprehensive overview of this research area. This paper addresses this gap by providing a systematic literature review, covering the analysis of over 300 works, encompassing 25 LLMs and more than 10 downstream scenarios. Our comprehensive overview addresses three key research questions: the construction of cybersecurity-oriented LLMs, the application of LLMs to various cybersecurity tasks, the challenges and further research in this area. This study aims to shed light on the extensive potential of LLMs in enhancing cybersecurity practices and serve as a valuable resource for applying LLMs in this field. We also maintain and regularly update a list of practical guides on LLMs for cybersecurity at https://github.com/tmylla/Awesome-LLM4Cybersecurity.

Liang Liao, Sen Lin, Lun Li et al.

Low-rank approximation of images via singular value decomposition is well-received in the era of big data. However, singular value decomposition (SVD) is only for order-two data, i.e., matrices. It is necessary to flatten a higher order input into a matrix or break it into a series of order-two slices to tackle higher order data such as multispectral images and videos with the SVD. Higher order singular value decomposition (HOSVD) extends the SVD and can approximate higher order data using sums of a few rank-one components. We consider the problem of generalizing HOSVD over a finite dimensional commutative algebra. This algebra, referred to as a t-algebra, generalizes the field of complex numbers. The elements of the algebra, called t-scalars, are fix-sized arrays of complex numbers. One can generalize matrices and tensors over t-scalars and then extend many canonical matrix and tensor algorithms, including HOSVD, to obtain higher-performance versions. The generalization of HOSVD is called THOSVD. Its performance of approximating multi-way data can be further improved by an alternating algorithm. THOSVD also unifies a wide range of principal component analysis algorithms. To exploit the potential of generalized algorithms using t-scalars for approximating images, we use a pixel neighborhood strategy to convert each pixel to "deeper-order" t-scalar. Experiments on publicly available images show that the generalized algorithm over t-scalars, namely THOSVD, compares favorably with its canonical counterparts.