PACT: Reducing Alert Fatigue in Low-Prevalence SOC Streams with Triggered Active Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ndichu, Samuel, Ban, Tao, Ozawa, Seiichi, Takahashi, Takeshi, Inoue, Daisuke
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Ndichu, Samuel
Ban, Tao
Ozawa, Seiichi
Takahashi, Takeshi
Inoue, Daisuke
author_facet Ndichu, Samuel
Ban, Tao
Ozawa, Seiichi
Takahashi, Takeshi
Inoue, Daisuke
contents Security operations centers face persistent alert fatigue: in low-prevalence streams, even low false-positive rates generate substantial investigation load, while aggregate F1 scores obscure analyst burden. We introduce PACT, a Pareto-aware controller for triggered active learning, which wraps an already-deployed frozen XGBoost-Focal screener with an adaptive windowing score-shift trigger and a hybrid acquisition rule combining threshold-relative uncertainty with high-score sampling. On two public low-prevalence benchmarks, AIT-ADS (AIT Alert Data Set), and BOTSv1 (Boss of the SOC version 1), PACT attains the lowest benign-normalized false-positive (FP) burden among the adaptive methods tested. It reduces burden by 43% and 21%, respectively, relative to a frozen baseline, while using 3.8x and 5.2x fewer analyst queries than periodic uniform-random updating. A matched-trigger ablation controls trigger timing and shows that acquisition contributes beyond timing alone, at the cost of approximately ten percentage points of positive-window recall under free-running triggers. A frozen threshold-only baseline pushes FP lower still but collapses BOTSv1 recall by 55 percentage points. Under the evaluated workload assumptions, pure FP minimization trades unacceptable recall for that lower burden.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_22324
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PACT: Reducing Alert Fatigue in Low-Prevalence SOC Streams with Triggered Active Learning
Ndichu, Samuel
Ban, Tao
Ozawa, Seiichi
Takahashi, Takeshi
Inoue, Daisuke
Cryptography and Security
68T05, 68M25
K.6.5; I.2.6; I.5.4
Security operations centers face persistent alert fatigue: in low-prevalence streams, even low false-positive rates generate substantial investigation load, while aggregate F1 scores obscure analyst burden. We introduce PACT, a Pareto-aware controller for triggered active learning, which wraps an already-deployed frozen XGBoost-Focal screener with an adaptive windowing score-shift trigger and a hybrid acquisition rule combining threshold-relative uncertainty with high-score sampling. On two public low-prevalence benchmarks, AIT-ADS (AIT Alert Data Set), and BOTSv1 (Boss of the SOC version 1), PACT attains the lowest benign-normalized false-positive (FP) burden among the adaptive methods tested. It reduces burden by 43% and 21%, respectively, relative to a frozen baseline, while using 3.8x and 5.2x fewer analyst queries than periodic uniform-random updating. A matched-trigger ablation controls trigger timing and shows that acquisition contributes beyond timing alone, at the cost of approximately ten percentage points of positive-window recall under free-running triggers. A frozen threshold-only baseline pushes FP lower still but collapses BOTSv1 recall by 55 percentage points. Under the evaluated workload assumptions, pure FP minimization trades unacceptable recall for that lower burden.
title PACT: Reducing Alert Fatigue in Low-Prevalence SOC Streams with Triggered Active Learning
topic Cryptography and Security
68T05, 68M25
K.6.5; I.2.6; I.5.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22324