Multi-Objective Discrete Extremal Optimization of Variable-Length Blocks-Based CNN by Joint NAS and HPO for Intrusion Detection in IIoT

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is an important part of industrial infrastructure but facing serious and evolving security threats in recent years. Deep learning has been widely considered as a promising solution for enhancing the security of IIoT. However, these existing deep learning models utilized in the intrusion detection of IIoT are manually developed that not only greatly rely on the experience of the designers but also is lack of utility due to the high model complexity. By taking into account the trade-off between the model performance and model complexity, this article makes the first attempt to propose a multi-objective joint optimization method of neural architecture search (NAS) and hyper-parameter optimization (HPO) based on multi-objective discrete extremal optimization (MODEO) to automatically design a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) for the intrusion detection task of IIoT, abbreviated as MODEO-CNN. A novel hybrid variable-length encoding strategy is developed by combing binary and integer encoding to characterize both the neural architectures including the number of blocks, the blocks-based network topology and the corresponding architecture parameters in CNN block, and some important hyper-parameters including batch size, learning rate, weight optimizer and regularization. The individual-based discrete multi-objective evolutionary process of MODEO is designed to obtain the Pareto-optimal CNN models. Three widely-used IIoT intrusion detection datasets, including the Gas Pipeline, BoT-IoT, and Power System Attack datasets, have been used to illustrate the superiority of the proposed MODEO-CNN over the state-of-the-art hand-craft models and two single-objective fixed-length blocks-based NAS models in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, F1-Score, and model's million floating point operations.