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arXiv · 2402.18986

Always be Pre-Training: Representation Learning for Network Intrusion Detection with GNNs

Zhengyao Gu·Diego Troy Lopez·Lilas Alrahis·Ozgur Sinanoglu
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Abstract

Graph neural network-based network intrusion detection systems have recently demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets. Nevertheless, these methods suffer from a reliance on target encoding for data pre-processing, limiting widespread adoption due to the associated need for annotated labels--a cost-prohibitive requirement. In this work, we propose a solution involving in-context pre-training and the utilization of dense representations for categorical features to jointly overcome the label-dependency limitation. Our approach exhibits remarkable data efficiency, achieving over 98% of the performance of the supervised state-of-the-art with less than 4% labeled data on the NF-UQ-NIDS-V2 dataset.

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Zhengyao Gu, Diego Troy Lopez, Lilas Alrahis, Ozgur Sinanoglu. 2024-02-29. Always be Pre-Training: Representation Learning for Network Intrusion Detection with GNNs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18986

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