Enhancing Open-Set RFF Recognition With cGAN: Generating Multiple Unknown Classes

Open set recognition (OSR) in radio frequency fingerprint (RFF) is critical for securing Internet of Things (IoT) systems, where previously unseen or malicious devices may attempt unauthorized access. A widely used approach treats all unknown devices as a single additional class and assumes that they will produce low confidence scores during inference. However, due to the inherently subtle and highly similar RFF features across devices, this assumption often fails, leading to high false acceptance rates. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework, called Multiple Unknown Classes Generation (MUCG), which replaces the single-class modeling of unknowns with a more expressive structure that simulates multiple distinct unknown classes. MUCG employs a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) guided by ideal signal priors to produce diverse and realistic unknown samples. Furthermore, we introduce a soft label perturbation (SLP) strategy that blends label semantics using Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM), encouraging the generator to embed richer feature variations. Experiments on three public IoT datasets demonstrate that MUCG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in OSR tasks, achieving superior accuracy and robustness under varying signal conditions.