Gmail's AI-Powered Spam Detection is its Biggest Security Upgrade in Years
Freeman writes:
The latest post on the Google Security blog details a new upgrade to Gmail's spam filters that Google is calling "one of the largest defense upgrades in recent years." The upgrade comes in the form of a new text classification system called RETVec (Resilient & Efficient Text Vectorizer). Google says this can help understand "adversarial text manipulations"-these are emails full of special characters, emojis, typos, and other junk characters that previously were legible by humans but not easily understandable by machines. Previously, spam emails full of special characters made it through Gmail's defenses easily.
[...] Google says the efficiency here is a big deal. Alternative approaches that used a "fixed vocabulary size" or "lookup table" for homoglyphs made them very resource-intensive to run. Imagine a list of every possible spelling and misspelling of "congratulations" that swaps out one or more characters for numbers, math symbols, Cyrillic, Hebrew, or emojis and you have a nearly endless list. Google says RETVec is only 200k "instead of millions of parameters," so while Google's spam-filtering cloud is probably big enough to run anything, this is small enough that it could even run on a local device. RETVec is open source, and Google hopes it will rid the world of homoglyph attacks, so even your local comment section could be running it someday.
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