United States

We present initial research on physics-mathematics modeling, computational simulation, and data visualization that aim at discovering the physics of the adversarial minds of threat actors who develop exploits and malware. In this research, the physics of an adversarial mind refer to laws that govern the dynamics of human cognition as reflected in malware. The physics of adversarial minds, in turn, may enable us to discover cognitive vulnerabilities that are exploitable through defensive cyber deception to persistently detect malware across many generations, or for as long as the malware are developed by threat actors whose cognition we have analyzed and have found to be vulnerable. We aim at discovering physics of cognition that pinpoint innate and hence possibly involuntary cognitive vulnerabilities, as well as developmental cognitive vulnerabilities. We expect these cognitive vulnerabilities to be persistent and recurring in a variety of manifestations. The enabler of the discovery of cognitive vulnerabilities in cyber space is a deep and thorough understanding of how the cognition of threat actors and cyber terrain interact with each other to produce exploits and malware. We aim at discovering the interplay between computing and the cognitive processes that take place in the mind of threat actors. In cognitive science, human cognition is often characterized via mathematical models. Our goal is to extend and adapt these models to operations in cyber space, and thus integrate them with elements of computing. A fusion of cognitive phenomena and computing in a mathematical form serves as basis for this research, which is envisioned to leverage cyber mechanisms to learn and then probe the cognition of threat actors for cognitive vulnerabilities. A key approach in this research is the small-scale decomposition of the presence of human mind in malware into particles. We develop small-scale mathematical models that characterize the individual action of those particles, their physical quantities, and how those physical quantities are related to each other. We encode in these small-scale models the inner workings of cognition in ways that resemble physical matter such as gasses and fluids, while representing the physics of cognition with high fidelity. We then exploit small-scale models to develop large-scale mathematical models of malware-reflected cognition. We discover physical properties of an adversarial mind in aggregate from a probabilistic examination via statistical physics and nonlinear dynamical systems theory of the underlying logical particles. Of particular interest are macroscopic physical quantities of cognition that emerge from the collective behavior of particles. In other words, this research discovers the thermodynamics of an adversarial mind using malware as measurable observable. This research explores statistical physics and dynamical systems theory similarly to how these disciplines were used to study gasses and fluids in conventional physics. By developing high-fidelity mathematical models that establish equivalence between cognition in malware and physical matter, this research creates potential for inheriting the past success of those methods.

NAML 2021

Mathematical Discovery of the Physics of Adversarial Minds in Malware for Customized and Targeted Deception

statistical physics.

threat actor cognition

cyber deception

malware

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.<br><br>
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EACL 2024

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

technical paper

Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific is partnering with AFCEA San Diego chapter to host the workshop.

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The annual workshop on Naval Applications of Machine Learning is an opportunity for researchers from Navy research and development centers and our partner organizations to exchange technical ideas and to come together as a team. The goals of NAML are to spread awareness of current machine learning research relevant to Naval applications, to connect machine learning researchers with experts in military requirements and to build and strengthen collaborations within the defense research community.


In a cyber defense scenario, it is important to mitigate threats on a system
in an automated and timely manner. While previous work with single-agent
reinforcement learning attempts to accomplish these goals, we improve upon
scalability by introducing a cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning al-
gorithm. More specically, we implement a Deep Q-Network (DQN) algorithm
with Metropolis consensus weights based on shared action-value function pa-
rameters. Using a cyber simulation, we compare the results of our multi-agent
DQN to the results of a single-agent DQN.

Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Cyber Defense

Labeled real world data is often difficult to obtain and especially scarce in Navy-related domains. Currently, relevant annotated data that does exist is frequently limited to large or medium sized bounding boxes, making it difficult to train computer vision algorithms to recognize smaller objects of interest. In this work, we present a naval-specific video dataset of helicopter operations performed at sea. This dataset contains videos from multiple camera sensors to incorporate variations in lens distortions and camera noise. It consists of videos ranging from one to three minutes each recorded during Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) exercises off the California coast in the fall and winter. Special consideration was taken to emphasize small instances of helicopters relative to the field of view and therefore provides a more even ratio of small-, medium-, and large-sized bounding boxes for training more robust detectors and trackers. Following the conventions of the field, we define small, medium, and large objects as objects with bounding boxes sized: less than 32, 32-96, and greater than 96 pixels squared respectively. We benchmark these videos on object detection with special consideration given to small-object mean average precision.


Helicopter Video Dataset for Detecting and Tracking

Fielding autonomous robotic systems in safety- and mission-critical applications requires careful scrutiny and oversight. Deploying these systems is predicated upon the availability of technologies – such as Human Intent Prediction (HIP) and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – that currently do not exist. We prescribe a new approach to HIP in order to enable Safe Human-Robot Interactions (Safe-HRI). We examine the limitations of existing technologies, while recommending caution in the design, development, and deployment of such systems in safety- and mission-critical applications.

Towards Intent Prediction for Safe Human-Robot Interaction

Electronic Warfare Support (ES) is the act of detecting, characterizing, and classifying potentially hostile electromagnetic signals, a crucial component of self-protection for manned and autonomous platforms in the increasingly congested modern battlefield. Current ES methods perform early identification of radio waveforms emitted by comparing the incoming waveform to heavily curated libraries. While effective, this legacy approach is slow to respond to a novel and agile waveforms emerging from recent advances in software defined radios (SDRs). The Neural Arrays for Autonomous Electronic Support (NAAES) program, sponsored by ONR, is using machine learning to dramatically reduce the time and effort to respond to novel waveforms. We have demonstrated the ability to characterize and classify RF waveforms in real time using the Intel Neural Compute Stick 2 (NCS2). NAAES achieved a DNN-enhanced modulation classification rate of over 7500 pulses per second, using seven 1-2W NCS2 devices running a combined 750 GFLOP/s.

Neural Arrays for Autonomous Electronic Support

The discussion provides a general overivew of the DON analytical approach, the Jupiter Enterprise Data Environment, the DON Data Community of Practice, and the 2021 DataCOP Challenge.

Jupiter & the DON Data Community of Practice

This presentation is an overview of the recently developed SpikePropamine meta-learning framework submitted for publication in the Frontiers In Neurorobotics journal. Material from the original paper as well as more recent developments will be presented. 

Our goal in developing this framework is to leverage synaptic plasticity in Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), the learning mechanism found in biological neural networks. Today, most engineered neural network only use fixed-weights despite the superior learning capabilities found in biological plastic neural networks. Therefore, SpikePropamine is a framework that harnesses the power of offline learning of fixed weights along with the online continual learning through synaptic plasticity. Specifically, along with the fixed weights, SpikePropamine additionally learns the rules that govern the online plastic learning and neuromodulation in SNNs through offline gradient descent. The capabilities of the framework are demonstrated through a series of challenging benchmarks. The parameters for variants of BCM, Oja’s and other plasticity and neuromodulated rules are learned. Results show that the SpikePropamine based networks are able to solve temporal learning tasks that fixed-weight SNNs fail to solve. Additional results highlight the robustness of SpikePropamine based SNNs to noise and novel conditions not seen during training. This is seen through minimal degradation of performance in a high-dimensional legged locomotion task governed by a SpikePropamine based SNN.


SpikePropamine: Meta-Learning Synaptic Plasticity for Spiking Neural Networks

It is well known that Deep Neural Network (DNN) implementations take massive volumes of data to sufficiently train their complex network architectures to perform high accuracy inferencing. The Machine Learning (ML) communities, academic and industry, have created sophisticated models of DNNs trained on millions of data samples to achieve robust classification performance. In the area of image analysis, to address the need for data, numerous efforts have led to standard curated datasets, such as MINST, CIFAR-10, Open Images, and ImageNet. In fact, the ImageNet dataset has become a de-facto image dataset for new algorithm evaluation. In a yearly competition, participants are invited to submit new and novel DNN architectures for assessment. The architectures are trained using the ImageNet database and then evaluated for classification performance. In order of development, some of the well-known winning networks originating from this competition are AlexNet, ZFNet, GoogleNet, VGG Net, ResNet, and Inception V4. As a benefit to the deep learning community, many of the competition submissions are released as open-source for others to use and refine. It is important to recognize that the key to the performance of these networks is that the data input into the network is similar in nature to the data on which the network was trained. Herein is the problem facing many Department of Defense (DoD) ML implementations; the lack of sufficient, operationally relevant data to train and innovate DNN architectures for the DoD community. 
As part of a 2020 Navy Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program, Areté and its academic partner, the University of Arizona, are developing an interactive scenario building tool capable of generating realistic synthetic 360° videos in real-time for use in DoD training simulators. This novel capability is accomplished by combining the latest advances in generative adversarial networks (GANs), Areté's expertise in physics-based modeling, and the advanced simulation capabilities of the Unreal Engine. In this talk, Areté will present examples of maritime relevant synthetic data compared to real-world data. Areté will then demonstrate how the data can be used to train DNN architectures directly or through transfer learning and how key technologies are marshaled together.


Using the Unreal Engine as a High Fidelity Simulation for Data Creation

This presentation places AI in a global context and provides perspectives that support the imperative for aggressively leading AI transformation at scale. It provides a strategic overview of AI as it relates to other exponential technologies, the expanding growth of data, bandwidth and computing power that is accelerating knowledge doubling around the globe. It discusses the significant economic implications of AI over the next 10 years, the state of global research and development investment and productivity as well as the state of national AI strategies and policies, research ecosystems and the AI-enabled future of the battlespace. A review of the National Security Commission Report on AI is provided to underscore the breadth and depth of impact and the requisite sense of urgency associated with AI and its applications.

AI in Global Context: The Imperative for Leding AI Transformation

Design, Demonstration, and Proof of Concept Using the Explainable Reinforcement Learning (XAI) of Soar for Combat Identification (CID) 


The performance of CPU-based and GPU- based systems is often low for PDE codes, where large, sparse, and often structured systems of linear equations must be solved. Iterative solvers are limited by data movement, both between caches and memory and between nodes. Here we describe the solution of such systems of equations on the Cerebras Systems CS-1, a wafer-scale processor that has the memory bandwidth and communication latency to perform well. We achieve 0.86 PFLOPS on a single wafer-scale system for the solution by BiCGStab of a linear system arising from a 7-point finite difference stencil on a 600 × 595 × 1536 mesh, achieving about one third of the machine’s peak performance. We explain the system, its architecture and programming, and its performance on this problem and related problems. We discuss issues of memory capacity and floating point precision. We outline plans to extend this work towards full applications. 


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