MetaScientist: A Human-AI Synergistic Framework for Automated Mechanical Metamaterial Design

The discovery of novel mechanical metamaterials, whose properties are dominated by their engineered structures rather than chemical composition, is a knowledge-intensive and resource-demanding process. To accelerate the design of novel metamaterials, we present MetaScientist, a human-in-the-loop system that integrates advanced AI capabilities with expert oversight with two primary phases: (1) hypothesis generation, where the system performs complex reasoning to generate novel and scientifically sound hypotheses, supported with domain-specific foundation models and inductive biases retrieved from existing literature; (2) 3D structure synthesis, where a 3D structure is synthesized with a novel 3D diffusion model based on the textual hypothesis and refined it with a LLM-based refinement model to achieve better structure properties. At each phase, domain experts iteratively validate the system outputs, and provide feedback and supplementary materials to ensure the alignment of the outputs with scientific principles and human preferences. Through extensive evaluation from human scientists, MetaScientist is able to deliver novel and valid mechanical metamaterial designs that have the potential to be highly impactful in the metamaterial field.

MAGIC: Detecting Advanced Persistent Threats via Masked Graph Representation Learning

Advance Persistent Threats (APTs), adopted by most delicate attackers, are becoming increasing common and pose great threat to various enterprises and institutions. Data provenance analysis on provenance graphs has emerged as a common approach in APT detection. However, previous works have exhibited several shortcomings: (1) requiring attack-containing data and a priori knowledge of APTs, (2) failing in extracting the rich contextual information buried within provenance graphs and (3) becoming impracticable due to their prohibitive computation overhead and memory consumption. In this paper, we introduce MAGIC, a novel and flexible self-supervised APT detection approach capable of performing multi-granularity detection under different level of supervision. MAGIC leverages masked graph representation learning to model benign system entities and behaviors, performing efficient deep feature extraction and structure abstraction on provenance graphs. By ferreting out anomalous system behaviors via outlier detection methods, MAGIC is able to perform both system entity level and batched log level APT detection. MAGIC is specially designed to handle concept drift with a model adaption mechanism and successfully applies to universal conditions and detection scenarios. We evaluate MAGIC on three widely-used datasets, including both real-world and simulated attacks. Evaluation results indicate that MAGIC achieves promising detection results in all scenarios and shows enormous advantage over state-of-the-art APT detection approaches in performance overhead.