Where Do Flow Semantics Reside? A Protocol-Native Tabular Pretraining Paradigm for Encrypted Traffic Classification

arXiv:2603.10051v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-supervised masked modeling shows promise for encrypted traffic classification by masking and reconstructing raw bytes. Yet recent work reveals these methods fail to reduce reliance on labeled data despite costly pretraining: under frozen encoder evaluation, accuracy drops from greater than 0.9 to less than 0.47. We argue the root cause is inductive bias mismatch: flattening traffic into byte sequences destroys protocol-defined semant