Curv-Tail achieves Tail-F1 scores of 85.70% and 46.30% on NUDT-Mobile (300 mobile-app classes) and DataCon-Website (100 encrypted proxy/VPN website classes) under natural long-tailed class frequencies, with only 0.84M parameters and 46.07M MACs per flow—using 98.48% fewer parameters and achieving 10.2× the batch inference throughput of MM4Flow at FP32 precision on an RTX 4090, with an amortized per-flow latency of 0.1359 ms at batch size 256.
From 2026-wang-curv-tail-lightweight-long-tailed — Curv-Tail: Lightweight Long-Tailed Encrypted Traffic Classification with Discrete Packet-Length Encoding and Lorentz Prototypes
· §3.2, §3.4, Table 1, Fig. 4(a)
· 2026
· arXiv preprint
Implications
Sub-millisecond per-flow inference at state-of-the-art accuracy with under 1M parameters makes deployment of this classifier feasible at line rate for resource-constrained network operators; circumvention tool designers cannot rely on ML infeasibility as protection.
Circumvention defenses must be validated against lightweight end-to-end classifiers trained directly on target data—not only large pre-trained transformer models that require separate pretraining stages and far greater compute.