Jul 5, 2026 · cs.AIJ/K move · Enter open · S save
Henry Kabuye, Biju Issac, Jeyamohan Neera
School of Computer Science, Northumbria University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
Ransomware has evolved into a complex, adaptive, and fast-moving adversary category in which static signatures and monolithic classifiers fail to generalise under concept drift, evasion, and behavioural polymorphism. In this paper, we present Agentic SABRE (Semantic-Behavioural Arbitration for Ransomware Evaluation), an uncertainty-aware, neuro-symbolic, multi-agent framework for adaptive ransomware detection. SABRE fuses semantic, representation-based evidence with behavioural, time-window forensic telemetry and employs Monte Carlo Dropout inference to quantify epistemic uncertainty for each agent. We introduce a decision-layer orchestrator that performs risk- and uncertainty-aware triage using two interpretable thresholds: a risk score and an uncertainty budget. High-confidence, high-risk samples are automatically contained, while uncertain or borderline cases are escalated to human analysts, establishing a flexible computational contract between autonomous response and analyst oversight. To support auditability and trust, SABRE integrates post-hoc explainability mechanisms, including gradient saliency, permutation importance, and counterfactual analysis, enabling both local and global interpretation of agent decisions. Extensive evaluation on RDset and RanSMAP demonstrates that Agentic SABRE preserves perfect discrimination on saturated semantic datasets, with AUC equal to 1.0, while improving robustness under weak behavioural signals. It achieves up to a 4.9 percent relative reduction in false escalations at equal recall while maintaining calibrated predictive uncertainty. Counterfactual analysis further shows that semantic and behavioural decisions can be reversed with bounded perturbation cost, indicating stable and interpretable decision boundaries.