Ethereum Fraud Detection via Joint Transaction Language Model and Graph Representation Learning

Ethereum faces growing fraud threats. Current fraud detection methods, whether employing graph neural networks or sequence models, fail to consider the semantic information and similarity patterns within transactions. Moreover, these approaches do not leverage the potential synergistic benefits of combining both types of models. To address these challenges, we propose TLMG4Eth that combines a transaction language model with graph-based methods to capture semantic, similarity, and structural features of transaction data in Ethereum. We first propose a transaction language model that converts numerical transaction data into meaningful transaction sentences, enabling the model to learn explicit transaction semantics. Then, we propose a transaction attribute similarity graph to learn transaction similarity information, enabling us to capture intuitive insights into transaction anomalies. Additionally, we construct an account interaction graph to capture the structural information of the account transaction network. We employ a deep multi-head attention network to fuse transaction semantic and similarity embeddings, and ultimately propose a joint training approach for the multi-head attention network and the account interaction graph to obtain the synergistic benefits of both.

The Role of Transformer Models in Advancing Blockchain Technology: A Systematic Review

As blockchain technology rapidly evolves, the demand for enhanced efficiency, security, and scalability grows.Transformer models, as powerful deep learning architectures,have shown unprecedented potential in addressing various blockchain challenges. However, a systematic review of Transformer applications in blockchain is lacking. This paper aims to fill this research gap by surveying over 200 relevant papers, comprehensively reviewing practical cases and research progress of Transformers in blockchain applications. Our survey covers key areas including anomaly detection, smart contract security analysis, cryptocurrency prediction and trend analysis, and code summary generation. To clearly articulate the advancements of Transformers across various blockchain domains, we adopt a domain-oriented classification system, organizing and introducing representative methods based on major challenges in current blockchain research. For each research domain,we first introduce its background and objectives, then review previous representative methods and analyze their limitations,and finally introduce the advancements brought by Transformer models. Furthermore, we explore the challenges of utilizing Transformer, such as data privacy, model complexity, and real-time processing requirements. Finally, this article proposes future research directions, emphasizing the importance of exploring the Transformer architecture in depth to adapt it to specific blockchain applications, and discusses its potential role in promoting the development of blockchain technology. This review aims to provide new perspectives and a research foundation for the integrated development of blockchain technology and machine learning, supporting further innovation and application expansion of blockchain technology.

Struggle with Adversarial Defense? Try Diffusion

Adversarial attacks induce misclassification by introducing subtle perturbations. Recently, diffusion models are applied to the image classifiers to improve adversarial robustness through adversarial training or by purifying adversarial noise. However, diffusion-based adversarial training often encounters convergence challenges and high computational expenses. Additionally, diffusion-based purification inevitably causes data shift and is deemed susceptible to stronger adaptive attacks. To tackle these issues, we propose the Truth Maximization Diffusion Classifier (TMDC), a generative Bayesian classifier that builds upon pre-trained diffusion models and the Bayesian theorem. Unlike data-driven classifiers, TMDC, guided by Bayesian principles, utilizes the conditional likelihood from diffusion models to determine the class probabilities of input images, thereby insulating against the influences of data shift and the limitations of adversarial training. Moreover, to enhance TMDC's resilience against more potent adversarial attacks, we propose an optimization strategy for diffusion classifiers. This strategy involves post-training the diffusion model on perturbed datasets with ground-truth labels as conditions, guiding the diffusion model to learn the data distribution and maximizing the likelihood under the ground-truth labels. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CIFAR10 dataset against heavy white-box attacks and strong adaptive attacks. Specifically, TMDC achieves robust accuracies of 82.81% against $l_{\infty}$ norm-bounded perturbations and 86.05% against $l_{2}$ norm-bounded perturbations, respectively, with $\epsilon=0.05$.

A Practical Solution for SAR Despeckling with Only Single Speckled Images

In this letter, we aim to address synthetic aperture radar (SAR) despeckling problem with the necessity of neither clean (speckle-free) SAR images nor independent speckled image pairs from the same scene, a practical solution for SAR despeckling (PSD) is proposed. Firstly, to generate speckled-to-speckled (S2S) image pairs from the same scene in the situation of only single speckled SAR images are available, an adversarial learning framework is designed. Then, the S2S SAR image pairs are employed to train a modified despeckling Nested-UNet model using the Noise2Noise (N2N) strategy. Moreover, an iterative version of the PSD method (PSDi) is also proposed. The performance of the proposed methods is demonstrated by both synthetic speckled and real SAR data. SAR block-matching 3-D algorithm (SAR-BM3D) and SAR dilated residual network (SAR-DRN) are used in the visual and quantitative comparison. Experimental results show that the proposed methods can reach a good tradeoff between speckle suppression and edge preservation.