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A Robust PPO-optimized Tabular Transformer Framework for Intrusion Detection in Industrial IoT Systems

Machine Learning 2025-05-27 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a robust and reinforcement-learning-enhanced network intrusion detection system (NIDS) designed for class-imbalanced and few-shot attack scenarios in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments. Our model integrates a TabTransformer for effective tabular feature representation with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to optimize classification decisions via policy learning. Evaluated on the TON\textunderscore IoT benchmark, our method achieves a macro F1-score of 97.73\% and accuracy of 98.85\%. Remarkably, even on extremely rare classes like man-in-the-middle (MITM), our model achieves an F1-score of 88.79\%, showcasing strong robustness and few-shot detection capabilities. Extensive ablation experiments confirm the complementary roles of TabTransformer and PPO in mitigating class imbalance and improving generalization. These results highlight the potential of combining transformer-based tabular learning with reinforcement learning for real-world NIDS applications.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.18234,
  title  = {A Robust PPO-optimized Tabular Transformer Framework for Intrusion Detection in Industrial IoT Systems},
  author = {Yuanya She},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.18234},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T02:34:38.175Z