A Semi-Supervised Meta-Negative-Learning Approach to Few-Shot Network Intrusion Detection in Internet of Things

The dynamic evolution of Internet of Things (IoT) threats necessitates reliable network intrusion detection (NID) systems. Such systems should not only respond to known security risks but also adapt effectively to emerging threats. However, practical deployments in novel IoT environments often suffer from significant data scarcity. In these cases, only a few labeled samples are available for training, which typically leads to poor performance. To address this challenge, we introduce a Semi-supervised Meta-negatIve-LEarning approach, termed SMILE, for few-shot network intrusion detection using network traffic data. Our approach begins by pretraining a baseline NID model with historical attack data, followed by an improved negative learning strategy with uncertainty-aware pseudo-negative labels. Bagging sampling is further incorporated to dynamically balance pseudo-labeled data distributions and enhance tolerance to labeling errors. SMILE enables effective knowledge transfer from historical attacks to few-shot traffic streams. Experimental results on the CICIDS-2017 dataset demonstrate that SMILE significantly improves detection accuracy by 7.30%–16.65% across diverse classifier architectures in both 5-shot and 10-shot scenarios, achieving a peak accuracy of 81.91%. Additional validation on the Edge-IIoT and IoT-23 datasets shows consistent improvements of 9.38% and 4.78%, reaching respective accuracies of 96.25% and 84.08% under 10-shot detection.