This work trains a chain-of-thought reasoning-enabled triage classifier on real, human-labeled Windows endpoint detections by combining automated prompt optimization, self-training, and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, and shows that a finetuned 30B model significantly outperforms frontier general-purpose models, motivating targeted training over scale.
Abstract
A major issue in Security Operations Centers (SOCs) is alert fatigue, as the number of detections reported is more than staff can triage in a given day. Prior work prompts or fine-tunes large language models (LLMs) to emit a triage label directly, but does not train them to reason about whether a detection is a genuine threat. We train a chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning-enabled triage classifier on real, human-labeled Windows endpoint detections by combining automated prompt optimization, self-training, and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. We find that CoT reasoning also degrades the label-token probabilities that automated triage relies on, so we separately train a calibrator that reads the full reasoning trace and estimates the probability that the verdict is correct. Our system reaches 82.6% test accuracy and, at the high-confidence operating point that governs automated triage, improves benign recall by 43.0% and malicious recall by 18.3% over a direct-label LLM classifier. We further show that the trained calibrator is necessary - an untrained confidence judge collapses high-confidence recall to zero - and that a finetuned 30B model significantly outperforms frontier general-purpose models, motivating targeted training over scale.
Cyberattacks are growing in complexity, and machine-learning-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) are increasingly adopted to support scalable threat monitoring. However, high-performing models can be operationally difficult to deploy when their decisions are not interpretable or auditable. This paper studies explainability as a decision-support component in an IDS workflow rather than as a purely visual add-on. Using the UNSW-NB15 benchmark, we compare three widely used classifiers—Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree (DT), and Support Vector Machine (SVM)—and then analyse the strongest performer (RF) with
post-hoc
explainability tools: Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) and Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP). RF achieved 95.3% accuracy (precision 94.8%, recall 96.1%, F1-score 95.4%), exceeding DT and SVM on the same split. LIME and SHAP consistently highlighted traffic-volume and duration-related features (e.g., destination bytes, source bytes, and flow duration) as influential drivers of intrusion predictions, providing actionable hypotheses for analyst triage and policy refinement. We further discuss how explanation outputs can be operationalized in cybersecurity training labs through auditable “rationale artifacts,” while clarifying that any observed reduction in false positives should be interpreted as the outcome of explanation-guided interventions (e.g., threshold tuning and triage rule adjustments) rather than a direct causal effect of generating explanations. Finally, we outline necessary research extensions—controlled baselines, robustness testing, and explanation stability/faithfulness analysis—to ensure reliable deployment of LIME/SHAP in safety-critical IDS settings.
Ahmad Almufarreh, Ashfaq Ahmad, Muhammad Arshad et al.· Frontiers of Computer Scienc...· 0 citations
Abstract - Rising volumes of sophisticated cyber attacks have rendered conventional signature-driven security tools insufficient for protecting modern digital assets. This study introduces a multi-layered intelligent detection system that unites supervised learning, unsupervised anomaly analysis, and ensemble decision strategies to identify network intrusions, malicious software activity, and stealthy advanced persistent threats in near real time. The pipeline begins with rigorous data cleansing and feature refinement that combines mutual-information ranking with principal-component analysis. Classification is performed by a soft-voting ensemble of Random Forest, gradient-boosted trees (XGBoost), and a compact deep neural network. Parallel anomaly scoring is obtained from Isolation Forest and a reconstruction-error autoencoder trained solely on benign flows. Evaluation on the NSL-KDD, CIC-IDS2017 and UNSW-NB15 collections yields detection accuracy reaching 98.7 %, precision of 97.9 %, recall of 98.4 % and an F1-score of 98.1 %, accompanied by a low rate of false alarms. SHAP-based explanations are attached to every prediction, giving security analysts transparent insight into model behaviour. Comparative benchmarks against recent published methods confirm that the proposed architecture delivers both higher accuracy and practical deployability inside enterprise security operations centres.
Key Words: network intrusion detection, ensemble machine learning, anomaly scoring, deep autoencoder, explainable artificial intelligence, cyber-attack classification, security operations.
Ameen Pasha.A· International Scientific Jou...· 0 citations
As the number and sophistication of cyberattacks increase, including those like ransomware, advanced persistent threats (APTs), and zero-day exploits, the structural weaknesses of signature-based and static intrusion detection systems (IDS) become evident as they fail to generalize to novel or adversarially crafted attack patterns Agbroko (2024), Hakke et al. (2025). The paper provides a systematic review of the application of modern security operations in threat detection and automated incident response using classical machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), reinforcement learning (RL), and metaheuristic optimization. A review of some of the benchmark sets shows that the ensemble and hybrid AI models consistently yield detection accuracy rates of 97–99% on curated datasets like NSL-KDD, CICIDS2017, and UNSW-NB15, which is significantly higher than the detection accuracy rates of legacy rule-based tools Waghmode and Kanumuri (2025), Sah et al. (2023), Jairu (2021). The paper also reviews Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) integration, reinforcement-learning-driven adaptive defense policies, and threat-intelligence feedback loops that will allow for continuous retraining of the model. Some persistent challenges include adversarial evasion and data-poisoning attacks, false positives causing alert fatigue, interpretability problems in deep models, and autopilot restrictions on autonomous response actions Jha (2025), Dong et al. (2018). The most significant frontiers for making this leap from high laboratory accuracy to robust, audit- and legally sound operational deployments are explainable AI (XAI), federated and privacy-preserving learning, and standardized benchmarking Hermosilla et al. (2025), Bi et al. (2024). A conceptual framework is proposed that combines detection, explanation, and orchestrated response in a continuous feedback loop that is suitable for zero trust and IoT-enabled critical-infrastructure environments Silva (2026).
Jayesh Dalmet· Journal of Digital Security...· 0 citations
Modern cyberattacks are increasingly dynamic, multi-stage, and difficult to recognize with static signatures alone. Machine learning (ML) provides a complementary approach by learning patterns from large volumes of security telemetry and identifying behavior that may indicate compromise. This paper presents an integrated framework for applying ML across the cyber threat intelligence lifecycle, from data ingestion and preprocessing to model training, deployment, continuous monitoring, and response. It discusses supervised classification and anomaly detection, together with specialized security functions such as web filtering, dynamic sandboxing, behavioral analysis, deceptive-domain detection, and email protection. The paper also emphasizes a human-in-the-loop model in which automated systems prioritize evidence while analysts validate important decisions. Finally, it considers data drift, concept drift, adversarial manipulation, privacy, and retraining. The proposed approach treats ML as one layer of a broader defense system, combining automated pattern recognition with threat context and human expertise to improve detection speed, reduce alert fatigue, and support adaptive cyber defense.
Mitra Bhargeshbhai Patel, Bindi Bhatt, Dharvi Soni et al.· International Journal of Sci...· 0 citations
Advanced persistent threats, zero-day exploits, encrypted command-and-control traffic, and botnet campaigns continue to reduce the reliability of conventional intrusion detection systems because static detectors provide limited transparency and weak adaptation under traffic drift. This paper presents an explainable and adaptive machine learning framework that integrates a LightGBM threat detector, SHAP-based decision explanations, density-aware concept drift detection, active incremental updating, and a contextual bandit defense policy. LightGBM is adopted because its leaf-wise gradient boosting structure provides high discrimination for heterogeneous flow features while maintaining low inference latency and native feature-importance support. The framework is evaluated on CIC-IDS2017, UNSW-NB15, and ToN_IoT using stratified train-validation-test splits, leakage prevention, five-run validation, and a 48-hour Kafka-based streaming simulation. The proposed model achieved 99.1% accuracy, 98.7% F1-score, 98.4% recall, and a 0.007 false alarm rate. During streaming evaluation, 14 adaptive model updates reduced mean detection latency from 27.4 s to 11.2 s, while SHAP explanations based on DNS entropy, JA3 rarity, packet interval, and flow-duration evidence reduced analyst triage time by 23%. Comparative results show that the proposed explainable adaptive pipeline improves detection reliability, reduces false alarms, and supports auditable mitigation decisions better than static and black-box IDS baselines.
P. A. Prakash, Salath Joseph A, A. M et al.· 2026 7th International Confe...· 0 citations
Large-scale DDoS attacks remain a serious threat to today's networked systems, which aim to make services unavailable by sending a massive amount of traffic. The traditional detection methods are mostly about attack categorization and are not that context-aware or actionable in providing support to security analysts. We propose SentinelsGuard AI, a self-learning DDoS classification and mitigation system that is built from a combination of machine learning, retrieval-augmented knowledge, and LLM-based reasoning in one platform. The proposed system is realized as a Flask-based web application, which processes the network flow statistics data, extracted from incoming traffic, and transforms the data to generate representative features of the network flows, before detecting the attacks using the XGBoost classifier. After classification, the framework accesses domain-specific attack intelligence from a structured Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) knowledge base with profiles of multiple categories of DDoS attacks. This contextual information is used with LLM-enabled reasoning to derive comprehensible security explanations, determine the severity of the attack, and suggest the firewall mitigation rules that can be applied. The framework stores analysis data in a SQLite database for operational monitoring, and displays security events in an interactive dashboard that includes traffic visualization, attack logs, and threat summaries. The architecture proposed brings statistical learning together with contextual knowledge of cybersecurity and attempts to bridge the gap between automatic attack detection and explainable incident response. It integrates all the key features of a classification-based network security decision support platform into a single stream, enabling a classification-based approach to network security to become more interpretable and usable in reality: persistent logging, visualization, knowledge retrieval, reasoning, and system recommendation of mitigations.
K. Phani, P. Karthik, PG Student et al.· 2026 International Conferenc...· 0 citations