Abstract
As cyber threats continue to evolve, ensuring network security has become increasingly critical. Deep learning-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) are crucial for addressing this issue. However, imbalanced training data and limited feature extraction weaken classification performance for intrusion detection. This paper presents a conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN) enhanced by Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), a pre-trained language model, for multi-class intrusion detection. This approach augments minority attack data through CGAN to mitigate class imbalance. BERT with robust feature extraction is embedded into the CGAN discriminator to enhance input–output dependency and improve detection through adversarial training. Experiments show the proposed model outperforms baselines on CSE-CIC-IDS2018, NF-ToN-IoT-V2, and NF-UNSW-NB15-v2 datasets, achieving F1-scores of 98.230%, 98.799%, and 89.007%, respectively, and improving F1-scores over baselines by 1.218%\(-\)13.844% 0.215%\(-\)13.779%, and 2.056%\(-\)22.587%.










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Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, and other research projects.
Funding
This work was supported in part by National Key R &D Program of China under Grant 2021YFB2012301, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61502230, 61501224, and 62202221, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province under Grant BK20201357 and BK20220331, the Six Talent Peaks Project in Jiangsu Province under Grant RJFW-020.
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Fang Li, Hang Shen, and Jieai Mai wrote the main manuscript text. Tianjing Wang, Yuanfei Dai, and Xiaodong Miao provided guiding ideas and suggestions. All authors reviewed the manuscript.
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Li, F., Shen, H., Mai, J. et al. Pre-trained language model-enhanced conditional generative adversarial networks for intrusion detection. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 17, 227–245 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-023-01595-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-023-01595-6