Search Results (15)

Extreme class imbalance is a persistent obstacle for machine learning-driven intrusion detection, as rare but high-impact cyberattacks occur far less frequently than benign traffic in training data. In many real-world cybersecurity datasets, this imbalance becomes extreme, with certain attack types containing a handful of samples, effectively placing the problem in a few-shot learning regime. This paper presents a controlled benchmarking study of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) objectives for synthesizing minority-class cyberattack data. Using the UWF-ZeekData22 network traffic dataset, each MITRE ATT&CK tactic is framed as a separate binary detection task, and tactic-specific GANs are trained solely on minority samples to generate synthetic attack records. Four widely used GAN variants—Vanilla GAN, Conditional GAN (cGAN), Wasserstein GAN (WGAN), and Wasserstein GAN with Gradient Penalty (WGAN-GP)—are compared under unified training steps and fixed augmentation conditions. The utility of generated data is assessed by evaluating downstream detection performance using five traditional classifiers: Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine, k-Nearest Neighbors, Decision Tree, and Random Forest. The results indicate that GAN augmentation generally strengthens minority-class detection across tactics and models, reducing false negatives and improving recall consistency, while not systematically harming majority-class performance. However, the effectiveness of each GAN objective varies significantly with data sparsity. Specifically, simpler adversarial objectives often outperform more complex architectures by preserving discriminative feature structure, while heavily regularized models may overly smooth minority-class distributions and reduce separability. Wasserstein-based objectives provide improved training stability, but additional regularization does not consistently translate to better detection performance. Overall, the results demonstrate that in extreme-imbalance settings, GAN effectiveness is governed more by data sparsity and structure preservation than by architectural complexity. These findings establish class-specific generative augmentation as a practical strategy for intrusion detection and provide empirical guidance for selecting appropriate GAN objectives for tabular cybersecurity data under highly imbalanced conditions. Full article

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are increasingly applied to mitigate extreme class imbalance in intrusion detection systems, yet reported improvements often obscure role augmentation intensity and adversarial stability. This paper presents a controlled ablation study that isolates the impact of adversarial objective choice, augmentation ratio, and training duration on GAN-based minority data augmentation for highly imbalanced tabular cybersecurity data. Using the UWF-ZeekData22 dataset, nine MITRE ATT&CK tactic-versus-benign classification tasks are evaluated under augmentation ratios of 0.25 and 0.50 and training durations of 400 and 800 epochs. Four GAN variants—Vanilla GAN, Conditional GAN (cGAN), WGAN, and WGAN-GP—are assessed using stratified cross-validation and five classical classifiers representing diverse inductive biases. The results reveal consistent structural patterns. Moderate augmentation (r = 0.25) with controlled training (400 epochs) yields the most stable and reliable improvement in minority recall. Wasserstein-based objectives demonstrate superior stability under aggressive augmentation and prolonged training, while conditional GANs frequently exhibit recall collapse in ultra-sparse regimes. Increasing augmentation volume does not uniformly improve performance and may introduce distributional overlaps that degrade linear and margin-based classifiers. Tree-based classifiers remain largely invariant once sufficient minority density is achieved. These findings demonstrate that adversarial calibration is more important than architectural complexity for improving the detection of rare attacks. The study provides practical guidance for designing robust GAN-based augmentation pipelines under extreme cybersecurity class imbalance. Full article

Traditional Turkish marbling (Ebru) art is an intangible cultural heritage characterized by highly asymmetric, fluid, and non-reproducible patterns, making its long-term preservation and large-scale dissemination challenging. It is highly sensitive to environmental conditions, making it enormously difficult to mass produce while maintaining its original aesthetic qualities. A data-driven generative model is therefore required to create unlimited, high-fidelity digital surrogates that safeguard this UNESCO heritage against physical loss and enable large-scale cultural applications. This study introduces a deep generative modeling framework for the digital reconstruction of traditional Turkish marbling (Ebru) art using a Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network (DCGAN). A dataset of 20,400 image patches, systematically derived from 17 original marbling works, was used to train the proposed model. The framework aims to mathematically capture the asymmetric, fluid, and stochastic nature of Ebru patterns, enabling the reproduction of their aesthetic structure in a digital medium. The generated images were evaluated using multiple quantitative and perceptual metrics, including Fréchet Inception Distance (FID), Kernel Inception Distance (KID), Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS), and PRDC-based indicators (Precision, Recall, Density, Coverage). For experimental validation, the proposed DCGAN framework is additionally compared against a Vanilla GAN baseline trained under identical conditions, highlighting the advantages of convolutional architectures for modeling marbling textures. The results show that the DCGAN model achieved a high level of realism and diversity without mode collapse or overfitting, producing images that were perceptually close to authentic marbling works. In addition to the quantitative evaluation, expert qualitative assessment by a traditional Ebru artist confirmed that the model reproduced the organic textures, color dynamics, and compositional asymmetrical characteristic of real marbling art. The proposed approach demonstrates the potential of deep generative models for the digital preservation, dissemination, and reinterpretation of intangible cultural heritage recognized by UNESCO. Full article

This study presents a texture-aware image synthesis framework designed to generate material-consistent façades using adversarial learning. The proposed architecture incorporates a mask-guided channel-wise attention mechanism that adaptively merges segmentation information with texture statistics to reconcile structural guiding with textural fidelity. A thorough comparative analysis was performed utilizing three internal variants—Vanilla GAN, Wasserstein GAN (WGAN), and WGAN-GP—against leading baselines, including TextureGAN and Pix2Pix. The assessment utilized a comprehensive multi-metric framework that included SSIM, FID, KID, LPIPS, and DISTS, in conjunction with a VGG-19 based perceptual loss. Experimental results indicate a notable divergence between pixel-wise accuracy and perceptual realism; although established baselines attained elevated PSNR values, the suggested Vanilla GAN and WGAN models exhibited enhanced perceptual fidelity, achieving the lowest LPIPS and DISTS scores. The WGAN-GP model, although theoretically stable, produced smoother but less complex textures due to the regularization enforced by the gradient penalty term. Ablation investigations further validated that the attention mechanism consistently enhanced structural alignment and texture sharpness across all topologies. Thus, the study suggests that Vanilla GAN and WGAN architectures, enhanced by attention-based fusion, offer an optimal balance between realism and structural fidelity for high-frequency texture creation applications. Full article

With the advancement in the “dual carbon” strategy and the integration of high proportions of renewable energy sources, AC/DC ultra-high-power grids are facing new security challenges such as commutation failure and multi-infeed coupling effects. Fault diagnosis, as an important tool for assisting power grid dispatching, is essential for maintaining the grid’s long-term stable operation. Traditional fault diagnosis methods encounter challenges such as limited samples and data quality issues under complex operating conditions. To overcome these problems, this study proposes a fault sample data enhancement method based on the Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network with Gradient Penalty (WGAN-GP). Firstly, a simulation model of the AC/DC hybrid system is constructed to obtain the original fault sample data. Then, through the adoption of the Wasserstein distance measure and the gradient penalty strategy, an improved WGAN-GP architecture suitable for feature learning of the AC/DC hybrid system is designed. Finally, by comparing the fault diagnosis performance of different data models, the proposed method achieves up to 100% accuracy on certain fault types and improves the average accuracy by 6.3% compared to SMOTE and vanilla GAN, particularly under limited-sample conditions. These results confirm that the proposed approach can effectively extract fault characteristics from complex fault data. Full article

The generation of realistic electrical load profiles is essential for advancing smart grid analytics, demand forecasting, and privacy-preserving data sharing. Traditional approaches often rely on large, high-resolution datasets and complex recurrent neural architectures, which can be unstable or ineffective when training data are limited. This paper proposes a data-driven framework based on a lightweight 1D Convolutional Wasserstein GAN with Gradient Penalty (Conv1D-WGAN-GP) for generating high-fidelity synthetic 24 h load profiles. The model is specifically designed to operate on small- to medium-sized datasets, where recurrent models often fail due to overfitting or training instability. The approach leverages the ability of Conv1D layers to capture localized temporal patterns while remaining compact and stable during training. We benchmark the proposed model against vanilla GAN, WGAN-GP, and Conv1D-GAN across four datasets with varying consumption patterns and sizes, including industrial, agricultural, and residential domains. Quantitative evaluations using statistical divergence measures, Real-vs-Synthetic Distinguishability Score, and visual similarity confirm that Conv1D-WGAN-GP consistently outperforms baselines, particularly in low-data scenarios. This demonstrates its robustness, generalization capability, and suitability for privacy-sensitive energy modeling applications where access to large datasets is constrained. Full article

In current industries, sampling inspections of the quality of powders, such as superabsorbent polymers (SAPs) still are conducted via visual inspection. The size of samples and foreign matter are around 500 μm, making them difficult for humans to identify. An automatic foreign matter detection system for powder has been developed in the present study. The powder samples can be automatically delivered, distributed, and recycled, and images of them are captured through the hardware of the system, while the identification software of this system was developed based on diffusion adversarial representation learning (DARL). The background image is a foreign-matter-free powder image with an input image size of 1024 × 1024 × 3. Since DARL includes adversarial segmentation, a diffusion process, and synthetic image generation, the DARL model was trained using a diffusion block with the employment of a U-Net attention mechanism and a spatial-adaptation de-normalization (SPADE) layer through the adoption of a loss function from a vanilla generative adversarial network (GAN). This model was then compared with supervised models such as a fully convolutional network (FCN), U-Net, and DeepLABV3+, as well as with an unsupervised Otsu threshold segmentation. It should be noted that only 10% of the training samples were utilized for the DARL to learn and the intersection over union (IoU) of the DARL can reach up to 80.15%, which is much higher than the 59.00%, 53.47%, 49.39%, and 30.08% for the Otsu threshold segmentation, FCN, U-Net, and DeepLABV3+ models. Therefore, the performance of the model developed in the present study would not be degraded due to an insufficient number of samples containing foreign matter. In practical applications, there is no need to collect, label, and design features for a large number of foreign matter samples before using the developed system. Full article

Electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft represent a crucial aviation technology to transform future transportation systems. The unique characteristics of eVTOL aircraft include reduced noise, low pollutant emission, efficient operating cost, and flexible maneuverability, which in the meantime pose critical challenges to advanced power retention techniques. Thus, optimal takeoff trajectory design is essential due to immense power demands during eVTOL takeoffs. Conventional design optimizations, however, adopt high-fidelity simulation models in an iterative manner resulting in a computationally intensive mechanism. In this work, we implement a surrogate-enabled inverse mapping optimization architecture, i.e., directly predicting optimal designs from design requirements (including flight conditions and design constraints). A trained inverse mapping surrogate performs real-time optimal eVTOL takeoff trajectory predictions with no need for running optimizations; however, one training sample requires one design optimization in this inverse mapping setup. The excessive training cost of inverse mapping and the characteristics of optimal eVTOL takeoff trajectories necessitate the development of the regression generative adversarial network (regGAN) surrogate. We propose to further enhance regGAN predictive performance through the transfer learning (TL) technique, creating a scheme termed regGAN-TL. In particular, the proposed regGAN-TL scheme leverages the generative adversarial network (GAN) architecture consisting of a generator network and a discriminator network, with a combined loss of the mean squared error (MSE) and binary cross-entropy (BC) losses, for regression tasks. In this work, the generator employs design requirements as input and produces optimal takeoff trajectory profiles, while the discriminator differentiates the generated profiles and real optimal profiles in the training set. The combined loss facilitates the generator training in the dual aspects: the MSE loss targets minimum differences between generated profiles and training counterparts, while the BC loss drives the generated profiles to share analogous patterns with the training set. We demonstrated the utility of regGAN-TL on optimal takeoff trajectory designs for the Airbus $A^3$ Vahana and compared its performance against representative surrogates, including the multi-output Gaussian process, the conditional GAN, and the vanilla regGAN. Results showed that regGAN-TL reached the 99.5% generalization accuracy threshold with only 200 training samples while the best reference surrogate required 400 samples. The 50% reduction in training expense and reduced standard deviations of generalization accuracy achieved by regGAN-TL confirmed its outstanding predictive performance and broad engineering application potential. Full article

A unifying $\alpha$-parametrized generator loss function is introduced for a dual-objective generative adversarial network (GAN) that uses a canonical (or classical) discriminator loss function such as the one in the original GAN (VanillaGAN) system. The generator loss function is based on a symmetric class probability estimation type function, ${\mathcal{L}}_{\alpha }$, and the resulting GAN system is termed ${\mathcal{L}}_{\alpha }$-GAN. Under an optimal discriminator, it is shown that the generator’s optimization problem consists of minimizing a Jensen-$f_{\alpha }$-divergence, a natural generalization of the Jensen-Shannon divergence, where $f_{\alpha }$ is a convex function expressed in terms of the loss function ${\mathcal{L}}_{\alpha }$. It is also demonstrated that this ${\mathcal{L}}_{\alpha }$-GAN problem recovers as special cases a number of GAN problems in the literature, including VanillaGAN, least squares GAN (LSGAN), least kth-order GAN (LkGAN), and the recently introduced $({\alpha }_D,{\alpha }_G)$-GAN with ${\alpha }_D=1$. Finally, experimental results are provided for three datasets—MNIST, CIFAR-10, and Stacked MNIST—to illustrate the performance of various examples of the ${\mathcal{L}}_{\alpha }$-GAN system. Full article

The web application market has shown rapid growth in recent years. The expansion of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and the Internet of Things (IoT) has created new web-based communication and sensing frameworks. Current security research utilizes source code analysis and manual exploitation of web applications, to identify security vulnerabilities, such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection, in these emerging fields. The attack samples generated as part of web application penetration testing on sensor networks can be easily blocked, using Web Application Firewalls (WAFs). In this research work, we propose an autonomous penetration testing framework that utilizes Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We overcome the limitations of vanilla GANs by using conditional sequence generation. This technique helps in identifying key features for XSS attacks. We trained a generative model based on attack labels and attack features. The attack features were identified using semantic tokenization, and the attack payloads were generated using conditional sequence GAN. The generated attack samples can be used to target web applications protected by WAFs in an automated manner. This model scales well on a large-scale web application platform, and it saves the significant effort invested in manual penetration testing. Full article

Image inpainting aims to synthesize missing regions in images that are coherent with the existing visual content. Generative adversarial networks have made significant strides in the development of image inpainting. However, existing approaches heavily rely on the surrounding pixels while ignoring that the boundaries might be uninformative or noisy, leading to blurred images. As complementary, global visual features from the remote image contexts depict the overall structure and texture of the vanilla images, contributing to generating pixels that blend seamlessly with the existing visual elements. In this paper, we propose a novel model, PA-DeepFill, to repair high-resolution images. The generator network follows a novel progressive learning paradigm, starting with low-resolution images and gradually improving the resolutions by stacking more layers. A novel attention-based module, the gathered attention block, is further integrated into the generator to learn the importance of different distant visual components adaptively. In addition, we have designed a local discriminator that is more suitable for image inpainting tasks, multi-task guided mask-level local discriminator based PatchGAN, which can guide the model to distinguish between regions from the original image and regions completed by the model at a finer granularity. This local discriminator can capture more detailed local information, thereby enhancing the model’s discriminative ability and resulting in more realistic and natural inpainted images. Our proposal is extensively evaluated over popular datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposal. Full article

Data augmentation is one of the most important problems in deep learning. There have been many algorithms proposed to solve this problem, such as simple noise injection, the generative adversarial network (GAN), and diffusion models. However, to the best of our knowledge, these works mainly focused on computer vision-related tasks, and there have not been many proposed works for one-dimensional data. This paper proposes a GAN-based data augmentation for generating multichannel one-dimensional data given single-channel inputs. Our architecture consists of multiple discriminators that adapt deep convolution GAN (DCGAN) and patchGAN to extract the overall pattern of the multichannel generated data while also considering the local information of each channel. We conducted an experiment with website fingerprinting data. The result for the three channels’ data augmentation showed that our proposed model obtained FID scores of $0.005,0.017,0.051$ for each channel, respectively, compared to $0.458,0.551,0.521$ when using the vanilla GAN. Full article

For the past several years, there has been an increasing focus on deep learning methods applied into computational pulse diagnosis. However, one factor restraining its development lies in the small wrist pulse dataset, due to privacy risks or lengthy experiments cost. In this study, for the first time, we address the challenging by presenting a novel one-dimension generative adversarial networks (GAN) for generating wrist pulse signals, which manages to learn a mapping strategy from a random noise space to the original wrist pulse data distribution automatically. Concretely, Wasserstein GAN with gradient penalty (WGAN-GP) is employed to alleviate the mode collapse problem of vanilla GANs, which could be able to further enhance the performance of the generated pulse data. We compared our proposed model performance with several typical GAN models, including vanilla GAN, deep convolutional GAN (DCGAN) and Wasserstein GAN (WGAN). To verify the feasibility of the proposed algorithm, we trained our model with a dataset of real recorded wrist pulse signals. In conducted experiments, qualitative visual inspection and several quantitative metrics, such as maximum mean deviation (MMD), sliced Wasserstein distance (SWD) and percent root mean square difference (PRD), are examined to measure performance comprehensively. Overall, WGAN-GP achieves the best performance and quantitative results show that the above three metrics can be as low as 0.2325, 0.0112 and 5.8748, respectively. The positive results support that generating wrist pulse data from a small ground truth is possible. Consequently, our proposed WGAN-GP model offers a potential innovative solution to address data scarcity challenge for researchers working with computational pulse diagnosis, which are expected to improve the performance of pulse diagnosis algorithms in the future. Full article

Deep learning models have been used in several domains, however, adjusting is still required to be applied in sensitive areas such as medical imaging. As the use of technology in the medical domain is needed because of the time limit, the level of accuracy assures trustworthiness. Because of privacy concerns, machine learning applications in the medical field are unable to use medical data. For example, the lack of brain MRI images makes it difficult to classify brain tumors using image-based classification. The solution to this challenge was achieved through the application of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based augmentation techniques. Deep Convolutional GAN (DCGAN) and Vanilla GAN are two examples of GAN architectures used for image generation. In this paper, a framework, denoted as BrainGAN, for generating and classifying brain MRI images using GAN architectures and deep learning models was proposed. Consequently, this study proposed an automatic way to check that generated images are satisfactory. It uses three models: CNN, MobileNetV2, and ResNet152V2. Training the deep transfer models with images made by Vanilla GAN and DCGAN, and then evaluating their performance on a test set composed of real brain MRI images. From the results of the experiment, it was found that the ResNet152V2 model outperformed the other two models. The ResNet152V2 achieved 99.09% accuracy, 99.12% precision, 99.08% recall, 99.51% area under the curve (AUC), and 0.196 loss based on the brain MRI images generated by DCGAN architecture. Full article

Recent technological innovations along with the vast amount of available data worldwide have led to the rise of cyberattacks against network systems. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) play a crucial role as a defense mechanism in networks against adversarial attackers. Machine Learning methods provide various cybersecurity tools. However, these methods require plenty of data to be trained efficiently, which may be hard to collect or to use due to privacy reasons. One of the most notable Machine Learning tools is the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), and it has great potential for tabular data synthesis. In this work, we start by briefly presenting the most popular GAN architectures, VanillaGAN, WGAN, and WGAN-GP. Focusing on tabular data generation, CTGAN, CopulaGAN, and TableGAN models are used for the creation of synthetic IDS data. Specifically, the models are trained and evaluated on an NSL-KDD dataset, considering the limitations and requirements that this procedure needs. Finally, based on certain quantitative and qualitative methods, we argue and evaluate the most prominent GANs for tabular network data synthesis. Full article