Abstract:Network faults propagate layer by layer along topology and protocol dependencies, yet operations systems typically observe only symptomatic alerts at the tail end of propagation chains, where distinct root-cause faults may produce highly similar end-point symptoms. Existing approaches, whether rule-based, machine learning (ML)-based, or large language model (LLM)-based, fundamentally map the alert set to a diagnosis in a single pass and are structurally incapable of resolving this end-point ambiguity. This paper proposes PropLLM, which is the first to integrate the hop-by-hop scene reconstruction paradigm with the generative reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Starting from end-point alerts, PropLLM traces back hop-by-hop along the propagation path, retrieving verifiable factual evidence from a dual-layer knowledge graph (KG) at each hop, while the proposed Temporal Causal Propagation Attention (TCPA) mechanism encodes known topological causal priors directly into the attention computation to guide the model along the correct causal direction, ultimately localizing the root cause and determining the fault type through a fully evidenced causal chain. On a real-world Wi-Fi multimodal fault dataset, PropLLM improves fault type diagnosis accuracy by 3.9\% and root cause localization accuracy by 4.7\% over the strongest baseline, while reducing the hallucination rate by 50.8\%. Supplementary experiments on the TeleLogs 5G dataset further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method across different network scenarios.
Abstract:Complex Question Answering (QA) is a fundamental and challenging task in NLP. While large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance in QA, they suffer from significant performance degradation when facing complex and abstract QA tasks due to insufficient reasoning capabilities. Works such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Tree-of-Thought (ToT) aim to enhance LLMs' reasoning abilities, but they face issues such as in-layer redundancy in tree structures and single paths in chain structures. Although some studies utilize Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods to assist LLMs in reasoning, the challenge of effectively utilizing large amounts of information involving multiple entities and hops remains critical. To address this, we propose the Matrix of Thought (MoT), a novel and efficient LLM thought structure. MoT explores the problem in both horizontal and vertical dimensions through the "column-cell communication" mechanism, enabling LLMs to actively engage in multi-strategy and deep-level thinking, reducing redundancy within the column cells and enhancing reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, we develop a fact-correction mechanism by constructing knowledge units from retrieved knowledge graph triples and raw text to enhance the initial knowledge for LLM reasoning and correct erroneous answers. This leads to the development of an efficient and accurate QA framework (MTQA). Experimental results show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on four widely-used datasets in terms of F1 and EM scores, with reasoning time only 14.4\% of the baseline methods, demonstrating both its efficiency and accuracy. The code for this framework is available at https://github.com/lyfiter/mtqa.
Abstract:Cyber threat intelligence is a critical tool that many organizations and individuals use to protect themselves from sophisticated, organized, persistent, and weaponized cyber attacks. However, few studies have focused on the quality assessment of threat intelligence provided by intelligence platforms, and this work still requires manual analysis by cybersecurity experts. In this paper, we propose a knowledge graph-based verifier, a novel Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) quality assessment framework that combines knowledge graphs and Large Language Models (LLMs). Our approach introduces LLMs to automatically extract OSCTI key claims to be verified and utilizes a knowledge graph consisting of paragraphs for fact-checking. This method differs from the traditional way of constructing complex knowledge graphs with entities as nodes. By constructing knowledge graphs with paragraphs as nodes and semantic similarity as edges, it effectively enhances the semantic understanding ability of the model and simplifies labeling requirements. Additionally, to fill the gap in the research field, we created and made public the first dataset for threat intelligence assessment from heterogeneous sources. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to create a dataset on threat intelligence reliability verification, providing a reference for future research. Experimental results show that KGV (Knowledge Graph Verifier) significantly improves the performance of LLMs in intelligence quality assessment. Compared with traditional methods, we reduce a large amount of data annotation while the model still exhibits strong reasoning capabilities. Finally, our method can achieve XXX accuracy in network threat assessment.