Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence for Robust Network Intrusion Detection: From Scratch to Transfer Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tran, Huynh T. T., Sander, Jacob, Cohen, Achraf, Jalaian, Brian, Bastian, Nathaniel D.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Tran, Huynh T. T.
Sander, Jacob
Cohen, Achraf
Jalaian, Brian
Bastian, Nathaniel D.
author_facet Tran, Huynh T. T.
Sander, Jacob
Cohen, Achraf
Jalaian, Brian
Bastian, Nathaniel D.
contents Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) play a vital role in protecting digital infrastructures against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. In this paper, we extend ODXU, a Neurosymbolic AI (NSAI) framework that integrates deep embedded clustering for feature extraction, symbolic reasoning using XGBoost, and comprehensive uncertainty quantification (UQ) to enhance robustness, interpretability, and generalization in NIDS. The extended ODXU incorporates score-based methods (e.g., Confidence Scoring, Shannon Entropy) and metamodel-based techniques, including SHAP values and Information Gain, to assess the reliability of predictions. Experimental results on the CIC-IDS-2017 dataset show that ODXU outperforms traditional neural models across six evaluation metrics, including classification accuracy and false omission rate. While transfer learning has seen widespread adoption in fields such as computer vision and natural language processing, its potential in cybersecurity has not been thoroughly explored. To bridge this gap, we develop a transfer learning strategy that enables the reuse of a pre-trained ODXU model on a different dataset. Our ablation study on ACI-IoT-2023 demonstrates that the optimal transfer configuration involves reusing the pre-trained autoencoder, retraining the clustering module, and fine-tuning the XGBoost classifier, and outperforms traditional neural models when trained with as few as 16,000 samples (approximately 50% of the training data). Additionally, results show that metamodel-based UQ methods consistently outperform score-based approaches on both datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_04454
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence for Robust Network Intrusion Detection: From Scratch to Transfer Learning
Tran, Huynh T. T.
Sander, Jacob
Cohen, Achraf
Jalaian, Brian
Bastian, Nathaniel D.
Machine Learning
Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) play a vital role in protecting digital infrastructures against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. In this paper, we extend ODXU, a Neurosymbolic AI (NSAI) framework that integrates deep embedded clustering for feature extraction, symbolic reasoning using XGBoost, and comprehensive uncertainty quantification (UQ) to enhance robustness, interpretability, and generalization in NIDS. The extended ODXU incorporates score-based methods (e.g., Confidence Scoring, Shannon Entropy) and metamodel-based techniques, including SHAP values and Information Gain, to assess the reliability of predictions. Experimental results on the CIC-IDS-2017 dataset show that ODXU outperforms traditional neural models across six evaluation metrics, including classification accuracy and false omission rate. While transfer learning has seen widespread adoption in fields such as computer vision and natural language processing, its potential in cybersecurity has not been thoroughly explored. To bridge this gap, we develop a transfer learning strategy that enables the reuse of a pre-trained ODXU model on a different dataset. Our ablation study on ACI-IoT-2023 demonstrates that the optimal transfer configuration involves reusing the pre-trained autoencoder, retraining the clustering module, and fine-tuning the XGBoost classifier, and outperforms traditional neural models when trained with as few as 16,000 samples (approximately 50% of the training data). Additionally, results show that metamodel-based UQ methods consistently outperform score-based approaches on both datasets.
title Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence for Robust Network Intrusion Detection: From Scratch to Transfer Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04454