# Boundary-Seeking GAN-Augmented TabTransformer for Adversarially Robust Intrusion Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16348 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16348/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [TabTransformer: Tabular Data Modeling Using Contextual Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06678/) (2020)
- [IDSGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Attack Generation against Intrusion Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02077/) (2018)
- [pForest: In-Network Inference with Random Forests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05680/) (2019)
- [TabAttackBench: A Benchmark for Adversarial Attacks on Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21027/) (2025)
- [On the Robustness of Tabular Foundation Models: Test-Time Attacks and In-Context Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02978/) (2025)
- [Revolutionizing Encrypted Traffic Classification with MH-Net: A Multi-View Heterogeneous Graph Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03279/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Machine learning-based intrusion detection systems (IDSs) often suffer from class imbalance and vulnerability to adversarial attacks, leading to degraded detection performance and reduced robustness. This study proposes a TabTransformer framework augmented by the Boundary-Seeking Generative Adversarial Network (BGAN) for flow-based intrusion detection using the CICIDS2017 dataset. BGAN serves a dual purpose by generating synthetic minority-class samples to mitigate data imbalance and producing adversarial samples to evaluate model robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that BGAN augmentation improves TabTransformer's Macro-F1 score from 82.96% to 86.50%, with the largest class-wise improvement observed for Web_Attack (F1 score: 0.29 to 0.61). Robustness evaluation shows that all non-augmented models experienced a 100% Performance Drop Rate (PDR) under adversarial testing, whereas all BGAN-augmented models achieved negative PDR values, indicating improved resilience. Furthermore, the augmented TabTransformer maintained stable and low False Triggered Rate (FTR) values (1.51%-2.92%) across all noise levels, compared with the BGAN-augmented Decision Tree, which reached 49.09% under benign perturbations. These findings demonstrate that BGAN consistently enhances both class balance and adversarial robustness, while the proposed BGAN-TabTransformer framework provides an effective and adaptive intrusion detection solution for adversarial network environments.