Recently, many password guessing algorithms have been proposed, seriously threatening cyber security. In this paper, we systematically review over thirty methods for password guessing published between 2016 and 2023. First, we introduce a taxonomy for classifying the existing methods into trawling guessing and targeted guessing. Second, we present an extensive benchmark dataset that can assist researchers and practitioners in successive works. Third, we conduct a bibliometric analysis to present trends in this field and cross-citation between reviewed papers. Further, we discuss the open challenges of password guessing in terms of diverse application scenarios, guessing efficiency, and the combination of traditional and deep learning methods. Finally, this review presents future research directions to guide successive research and development of password guessing.

Accurate and timely precipitation forecasts are critical in modern society, influencing both economic activity and daily life. While deep learning methods leveraging remotely sensed radar data have become prevalent for precipitation nowcasting, longer-term forecasting remains challenging. This is due to accumulated errors in deep learning models and insufficient information about precipitation systems over longer time horizons. To address these challenges, we introduce the Short-Term Precipitation Forecast Network (STPF-Net), a recurrent neural network designed for longer-term precipitation prediction. STPF-Net uses a multi-tier structure with varying temporal resolutions to mitigate the accumulated errors during longer forecasts. Additionally, its transformer-based module incorporates larger spatial contexts, providing more complete information about precipitation systems. We evaluated STPF-Net on radar data from southeastern China, training separate models for 6 and 12 h forecasts. Quantitative results demonstrate STPF-Net achieved superior accuracy and lower errors compared to benchmark deep learning and numerical weather prediction models. Visualized case studies indicate reasonably coherent 6 h predictions from STPF-Net versus other methods. For 12 h forecasts, while STPF-Net outperformed other models, it still struggled with storm initiation over longer forecasting time.

Recently, text style transfer has become a very hot research topic in the field of natural language processing. However, the conventional text style transfer is unidirectional, and it is not possible to obtain a model with multidirectional transformations through training once. To address this limitation, we propose a new task called multidirectional text style transfer. It aims to use a single model to transfer the underlying style of text among multiple style attributes and keep its main content unchanged. In this paper, we propose Unified Generative Adversarial Networks (UGAN), a practical approach that combines target vector and generative adversarial techniques to perform multidirectional text style transfer. Our model allows simultaneous training of multi-attribute data on a single network. Such unified structure makes our model more efficient and flexible than existing approaches. We demonstrate the superiority of our approach on three benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that our method not only outperforms other baselines, but also reduces training time by an average of 13%.