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NetGPT: Generative Pretrained Transformer for Network Traffic

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arxiv 2304.09513 v3 pith:GNCIAWRJ submitted 2023-04-19 cs.NI cs.AIcs.LG

NetGPT: Generative Pretrained Transformer for Network Traffic

classification cs.NI cs.AIcs.LG
keywords trafficnetworktaskspretraineddiversegenerationdatadownstream
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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All data on the Internet are transferred by network traffic, thus accurately modeling network traffic can help improve network services quality and protect data privacy. Pretrained models for network traffic can utilize large-scale raw data to learn the essential characteristics of network traffic, and generate distinguishable results for input traffic without considering specific downstream tasks. Effective pretrained models can significantly optimize the training efficiency and effectiveness of downstream tasks, such as application classification, attack detection and traffic generation. Despite the great success of pretraining in natural language processing, there is no work in the network field. Considering the diverse demands and characteristics of network traffic and network tasks, it is non-trivial to build a pretrained model for network traffic and we face various challenges, especially the heterogeneous headers and payloads in the multi-pattern network traffic and the different dependencies for contexts of diverse downstream network tasks. To tackle these challenges, in this paper, we make the first attempt to provide a generative pretrained model NetGPT for both traffic understanding and generation tasks. We propose the multi-pattern network traffic modeling to construct unified text inputs and support both traffic understanding and generation tasks. We further optimize the adaptation effect of the pretrained model to diversified tasks by shuffling header fields, segmenting packets in flows, and incorporating diverse task labels with prompts. With diverse traffic datasets from encrypted software, DNS, private industrial protocols and cryptocurrency mining, expensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our NetGPT in a range of traffic understanding and generation tasks on traffic datasets, and outperform state-of-the-art baselines by a wide margin.

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Cited by 11 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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  3. Protocol-Aware Tokenization and Architecture Co-Design for Wireless Packet Foundation Models

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    Protocol-aware tokenization is the primary performance driver for wireless packet foundation models, delivering 32-point accuracy gains while architecture changes yield only 2 points in a controlled 2x2 comparison.

  4. MambaNetBurst: Direct Byte-level Network Traffic Classification without Tokenization or Pretraining

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A compact Mamba-2 model performs end-to-end byte-level network traffic classification without tokenization or pre-training and remains competitive with substantially larger pre-trained systems.

  5. Versatile yet Efficient Network Traffic Analysis: Offloading Network Foundation Model to SmartNIC

    cs.NI 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Nepco offloads network foundation models to SmartNICs using localized byte-sequence modeling and a pattern-aware convolutional architecture to achieve competitive macro F1 scores with 328x lower end-to-end latency tha...

  6. NetVAD: Foundation-Model Representation Learning for Identifier-Free Unsupervised Intrusion Detection

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    NetVAD uses a strictly identifier-free VAE on frozen foundation model embeddings, trained solely on benign traffic, to achieve 98% micro F1 and 96% macro F1 on ToN-IoT for unsupervised intrusion detection.

  7. NetVAD: Foundation-Model Representation Learning for Identifier-Free Unsupervised Intrusion Detection

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    NetVAD is a strictly identifier-free VAE that projects frozen foundation-model network representations into a latent space trained solely on benign traffic, reporting 98% micro F1 and 96% macro F1 on ToN-IoT.

  8. UniAlign: A Model-Agnostic Framework for Robust Network Traffic Classification under Distribution Shifts

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    UniAlign improves robustness of deep learning NTC models under distribution shifts via domain alignment fine-tuning and stable ensembling, yielding 2.51% accuracy and 2.71% F1 gains over standard training on three pub...

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    Traffic-MoE is a mixture-of-experts traffic transformer that claims up to 12.38% better detection Macro-F1 than dense pre-trained baselines while roughly doubling throughput and cutting latency by roughly half.

  11. A Comprehensive Survey on Network Traffic Synthesis: From Statistical Models to Deep Learning

    cs.NI 2025-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    A survey reviewing statistical and deep learning approaches to synthetic network traffic generation, with comparisons, an AI comparison tool, open challenges, and future directions.