22 March 2026 in Data Science and Engineering
With the continued digitization of social and industrial processes, diverse and increasingly massive volumes of spatial-temporal data are being accumulated, which enable the use of data mining to fuel important applications. Thus, neural network-based techniques have been developed to capture spatial and temporal dependencies in spatial-temporal data. Most recently, the advances in generative techniques, including large language models, masked autoencoders, sequence-to-sequence models, diffusion models, and others, have led to their increased use in spatial-temporal data mining, thereby driving new advances in spatial-temporal data mining. This paper describes the general types of spatial-temporal data, all kinds of spatial-temporal data instances, and generative techniques, and it proposes a spatial-temporal data mining pipeline. Further, it delivers a structured overview of generative techniques for spatial-temporal data mining, grounded in a novel taxonomy. Moreover, by outlining promising research avenues enabled by generative techniques, the paper seeks to accelerate advances in spatial-temporal data mining.
21 September 2025 in arXiv
Fuzzing is effective for vulnerability discovery but struggles with complex targets such as compilers, interpreters, and database engines, which accept textual input that must satisfy intricate syntactic and semantic constraints. Although language models (LMs) have attracted interest for this task due to their vast latent knowledge and reasoning potential, their practical adoption has been limited. The major challenges stem from insufficient exploration of deep program logic among real-world codebases, and the high cost of leveraging larger models. To overcome these challenges, we propose R1-Fuzz, the first framework that leverages reinforcement learning (RL) to specialize cost-efficient LMs and integrate them for complex textual fuzzing input generation. R1-Fuzz introduces two key designs: coverage-slicing-based question construction and a distance-based reward calculation. Through RL-based post-training of a model with our constructed dataset, R1-Fuzz designs a fuzzing workflow that tightly integrates LMs to reason deep program semantics during fuzzing. Evaluations on diverse real-world targets show that our design enables a small model, named R1-Fuzz-7B, to rival or even outperform much larger models in real-world fuzzing. Notably, R1-Fuzz achieves up to 75\% higher coverage than state-of-the-art fuzzers and discovers 29 previously unknown vulnerabilities, demonstrating its practicality.