Joint Semantic Transfer Network for IoT Intrusion Detection

In this article, we propose a joint semantic transfer network (JSTN) toward effective intrusion detection (ID) for large-scale scarcely labeled Internet of Things (IoT) domain. As a multisource heterogeneous domain adaptation (MS-HDA) method, the JSTN integrates a knowledge-rich network intrusion (NI) domain and another small-scale IoT intrusion (II) domain as source domains and preserves intrinsic semantic properties to assist target II domain ID. The JSTN jointly transfers the following three semantics to learn a domain-invariant and discriminative feature representation. The scenario semantic endows source NI and II domains with characteristics from each other to ease the knowledge transfer process via a confused domain discriminator and categorical distribution knowledge preservation. It also reduces the source–target discrepancy to make the shared feature space domain invariant. Meanwhile, the weighted implicit semantic transfer boosts discriminability via a fine-grained knowledge preservation, which transfers the source categorical distribution to the target domain. The source–target divergence guides the importance weighting during knowledge preservation to reflect the degree of knowledge learning. Additionally, the hierarchical explicit semantic alignment performs centroid-level and representative-level alignment with the help of a geometric similarity-aware pseudo-label refiner, which exploits the value of the unlabeled target II domain and explicitly aligns feature representations from a global and local perspective in a concentrated manner. Comprehensive experiments on various tasks verify the superiority of the JSTN against state-of-the-art comparing methods, on average a 10.3% of accuracy boost is achieved. The statistical soundness of each constituting component and the computational efficiency is also verified.