An integrated evolution-aware meta-learning framework with adversarial morphological augmentation for zero-day threat...

Most modern threat detection frameworks rely on fixed class definitions and retrospective signatures derived from historical data, limiting their ability to adapt to evolving attack behaviors. However, contemporary threats are increasingly polymorphic, adaptive, and include a growing number of zero-day attacks, making traditional pattern-matching approaches insufficient. With expanding attack surfaces across cloud environments, IoT systems, and heterogeneous infrastructures, detection systems must move beyond static similarity matching and instead account for the evolutionary nature of threats. Despite advances, both deep learning-based and traditional anomaly detection approaches face critical limitations. Deep learning models often suffer from data scarcity, concept drift, poor uncertainty calibration, and limited causal interpretability, while conventional anomaly detection methods exhibit slow training, weak generalization, and reduced adaptability to novel attack patterns.

To address these challenges, we propose M³-GAZE (Meta-Morphological GAN-Augmented Zero-day Detection Engine), which formulates threat detection as an evolutionary inference problem. The framework consists of five analytically distinct yet interdependent components. First, the Latent Morphology Spectrum Extraction (LMSE) module learns a continuous latent representation capturing structural invariants of threats across morphological variations, enabling a more flexible representation than discrete labels. This latent space is utilized by the Adversarial Evolutionary GAN (AE-GAN) to generate evolution-consistent synthetic samples that reflect unseen attack variations while minimizing unrealistic artifacts. These synthetic samples enhance the training of the Meta-Adaptation Framework for Threat Intelligence (MAFTI), which learns adaptation strategies across multiple evolutionary tasks, enabling accurate zero-day detection under limited data conditions. The enriched latent space further supports Adversarial Uncertainty Calibration Layer (AUCL), which evaluates epistemic uncertainty by introducing controlled adversarial perturbations. This transforms uncertainty into an action able early warning signal. Finally, the Causal Evolutionary Threat Graph Synthesizer (CETGS) constructs a temporal causal graph that explains threat evolution, detection decisions, and propagation dynamics.

Overall, M³-GAZE improves zero-day recall, enhances few-shot adaptability, calibrates uncertainty, reduces false negatives, and provides interpretable, temporally aware threat detection.