# DeepXplain: XAI-Guided Autonomous Defense Against Multi-Stage APT Campaigns

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21296 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21296/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Adversarial robustness and RL in finance, one of 15 directions in Deep reinforcement learning methods.
- Builds on 4 of its 11 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- Deep reinforcement learning methods / [Adversarial robustness and RL in finance](https://mlsanity.com/deeprl/adversarial-robustness-and-rl-in-finance/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [GNNExplainer: Generating Explanations for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03894/) (2019)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Trustworthy Graph Neural Networks: Privacy, Robustness, Fairness, and Explainability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08570/) (2022)
- [Entity-based Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Cyber Defence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17647/) (2024)
- [DeepStage: Learning Autonomous Defense Policies Against Multi-Stage APT Campaigns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16969/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [DeepFaith: Evidence-Grounded LLMs for Faithful Incident Reporting in Multi-Stage APT Defense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24348/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are stealthy, multi-stage attacks that require adaptive and timely defense. While deep reinforcement learning (DRL) enables autonomous cyber defense, its decisions are often opaque and difficult to trust in operational environments. This paper presents DeepXplain, an explainable DRL framework for stage-aware APT defense. Building on our prior DeepStage model, DeepXplain integrates provenance-based graph learning, temporal stage estimation, and a unified XAI pipeline that provides structural, temporal, and policy-level explanations. Unlike post-hoc methods, explanation signals are incorporated directly into policy optimization through evidence alignment and confidence-aware reward shaping. To the best of our knowledge, DeepXplain is the first framework to integrate explanation signals into reinforcement learning for APT defense. Experiments in a realistic enterprise testbed show improvements in stage-weighted F1-score (0.887 to 0.915) and success rate (84.7% to 89.6%), along with higher explanation confidence (0.86), improved fidelity (0.79), and more compact explanations (0.31). These results demonstrate enhanced effectiveness and trustworthiness of autonomous cyber defense.