CIS490/references/Transformer-based malware detection using process resource utilization metrics.md
Max Gorog 9e38f78379 training/dashboard(references): description sidebar + better space use
Two changes per the user's feedback that the slide had unused
horizontal space and needed per-PDF context.

Layout
- The reference scene is now a 2-column grid inside the
  metric-stack: PDF iframe at ~1.7fr on the left, description
  panel at ~0.55fr on the right (min 280px). On narrow viewports
  (<1100px) it falls back to a vertical stack with the
  description capped to 240px.
- Added #zoom=page-width to the iframe URL so the PDF's page
  fits its column width instead of leaving margins beside an
  8.5x11 page rendered in a wider iframe.
- Hide the prose card on the references scene — the description
  panel inside the stack covers what the prose was saying, and
  freeing the right edge gives the description proper room.

Description content
- Backend reads <stem>.md sidecar files alongside each PDF and
  returns the contents in the /api/references payload.
- Frontend renders them with a tiny built-in markdown subset
  (headings, bold/italic, lists, inline code, paragraphs) — no
  third-party renderer dependency.
- Initial draft sidecar .md files committed for the four PDFs
  currently in references/. Each describes how the paper informs
  a specific scene of the deck (which model row, which eval
  protocol, which channel selection). Edit them in place and the
  panel updates on the next reload.
2026-05-08 12:40:32 -05:00

1.3 KiB

Strongest published precedent for this exact setup

This paper applies transformer architectures to per-process resource-utilisation metrics — the same shape of telemetry we collect from /proc. Closest reference to "the project we're doing, but already published."

What we borrowed

  • Channel selection. Their list of /proc channels overlaps heavily with ours (cpu_user_jiffies, cpu_sys_jiffies, rss_bytes, io_*_bytes, voluntary_ctxsw, involuntary_ctxsw, page-fault counters). Our 12-channel selection is essentially this set, validated.
  • Window-and-classify framing. They confirm that a transformer reading short windows of these counters beats per-window hand-features fed to gradient-boosted trees. That is exactly the comparison we run: KNN-on-features vs sequence-models-on-windows.
  • Held-out-sample evaluation. They emphasise generalising to unseen malware families, not unseen time-slices of the same family. We adopt the same eval protocol on the perf scene.

Where it differs

  • They use a much larger corpus and run on commercial endpoints; we run on three lab hosts and a Pi. Their numbers are an upper bound on what we can hope to reproduce — they're the target, not the floor.
  • They don't publish their exact dataset, so the comparison is architectural, not reproductive.