Generative Adversarial Networks

Machine learning-based cybersecurity systems are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, while Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) act as both powerful attack enablers and promising defenses. This survey systematically reviews GAN-based adversarial defenses in cybersecurity (2021--August 31, 2025), consolidating recent progress, identifying gaps, and outlining future directions. Using a PRISMA-compliant systematic literature review protocol, we searched five major digital libraries. From 829 initial records, 185 peer-reviewed studies were retained and synthesized through quantitative trend analysis and thematic taxonomy development. We introduce a four-dimensional taxonomy spanning defensive function, GAN architecture, cybersecurity domain, and adversarial threat model. GANs improve detection accuracy, robustness, and data utility across network intrusion detection, malware analysis, and IoT security. Notable advances include WGAN-GP for stable training, CGANs for targeted synthesis, and hybrid GAN models for improved resilience. Yet, persistent challenges remain such as instability in training, lack of standardized benchmarks, high computational cost, and limited explainability. GAN-based defenses demonstrate strong potential but require advances in stable architectures, benchmarking, transparency, and deployment. We propose a roadmap emphasizing hybrid models, unified evaluation, real-world integration, and defenses against emerging threats such as LLM-driven cyberattacks. This survey establishes the foundation for scalable, trustworthy, and adaptive GAN-powered defenses.

Recent advances in continuous conditional generative modeling, including Continuous conditional Generative Adversarial Network (CcGAN) and Continuous Conditional Diffusion Model (CCDM), estimate high-dimensional data distributions conditioned on scalar regression labels such as angles, ages, or temperatures. However, fixed-size vicinal training in CcGAN can be sensitive to non-uniform label densities, whereas CCDM relies on computationally expensive iterative sampling. To address these issues, we propose CcGAN-AVAR, an imbalance-aware extension of CcGAN that combines soft/hybrid adaptive vicinity with auxiliary discriminator-guided regularization. The adaptive vicinity constructs a label-dependent local radius according to the available samples around each target condition, and the multi-task discriminator supplies both a regression signal for label consistency and a density-ratio-estimation signal for distribution matching. We further provide a theoretical interpretation characterizing how adaptive vicinal weighting affects the local bias-variance behavior of the discriminator target, how hybrid truncation reduces objective-level cross-condition mixing, and how the density-ratio-based generator penalty approximates a Pearson Chi-square discrepancy up to the estimation error of the density-ratio branch. Extensive experiments on four datasets, including the newly constructed imbalanced RC-49-I, covering resolutions from 64x64 to 256x256 across eleven settings, demonstrate that CcGAN-AVAR obtains strong generation quality and label consistency while preserving the one-step sampling efficiency of GANs, achieving 300x--2000x faster inference than CCDM.

The tabular form constitutes the standard way of representing data in relational database systems and spreadsheets. But, similarly to other forms, tabular data suffers from class imbalance, a problem that causes serious performance degradation in a wide variety of machine learning tasks. One of the most effective solutions dictates the usage of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in order to synthesize artificial data instances for the under-represented classes. Despite their good performance, most of the proposed GAN models do not take into account the vector subspaces of the input samples in the real data space, leading to data generation in arbitrary locations. In addition, the class labels are handled in the same manner as the other categorical variables, so conditional sampling by class is rendered less effective. To overcome these problems, this study presents ctdGAN, a conditional GAN for alleviating class imbalance in tabular datasets. Initially, ctdGAN executes a space partitioning step to assign cluster labels to the input samples. Subsequently, it utilizes these labels to synthesize samples via a novel probabilistic sampling strategy and a new loss function that penalizes both cluster and class mis-predictions. In this way, ctdGAN generates samples in subspaces that resemble those of the original data distribution. We also introduce several other improvements, including a simple, yet effective cluster-wise scaling technique that captures multiple feature modes without affecting data dimensionality. The evaluation of ctdGAN with 14 imbalanced datasets demonstrated its strong ability in generating high fidelity samples and improving classification accuracy.

Observed records of climate extremes provide an incomplete view of plausible hazards, missing "unseen" events beyond historical experience. Ignoring spatial dependence further underestimates hazards striking multiple locations simultaneously. We introduce DeepX-GAN (Dependence-Enhanced Embedding for Physical eXtremes-Generative Adversarial Network), a deep generative model that explicitly captures the spatial structure of rare extremes. Its zero-shot generalizability enables the simulation of statistically plausible extremes beyond the observed record, evaluated against long climate model large-ensemble simulations. We define two unseen types: direct-hit extremes that affect the target, and near-miss extremes that narrowly miss. These unrealized events reveal hidden risks and can either prompt proactive adaptation or reinforce a false sense of resilience. Applying DeepX-GAN to the Middle East and North Africa shows that the probability of unseen heat extremes is disproportionately distributed toward countries with high vulnerability and low socioeconomic readiness. Using a representative climate simulation, we demonstrate how future warming could expand and shift these hazards, creating persistent hotspots in Northwest Africa and the Arabian Peninsula and new hotspots in Central Africa, necessitating spatially adaptive resilience planning.

We introduce Seed-to-Seed Translation (StS), a novel approach that combines GANs and diffusion models (DMs) for unpaired Image-to-Image Translation. Our approach is aimed at global translations of complex automotive scenes, where close adherence to the structure and semantics of the source image is essential. We demonstrate that the semantic information encoded in the space of inverted latents (seeds) of a pretrained DM, dubbed as the seed-space, can be used for discriminative tasks, and leverage this information to perform image-to-image translation. Our method involves training an sts-GAN, an unpaired seed-to-seed translation model, based on CycleGAN. The translated seeds are used as the starting point for the DM's sampling process, while structure preservation is ensured using a ControlNet. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for structure-preserving translation of complex automotive scenes, showcasing superior performance compared to existing GAN-based and diffusion-based methods. In addition to advancing the SoTA in automotive scene translations, our approach offers a fresh perspective on leveraging the semantic information encoded within the seed-space of pretrained DMs for effective image editing and manipulation.

Super-Resolution (SR) is a time-hallowed image processing problem that aims to improve the quality of a Low-Resolution (LR) sample up to the standard of its High-Resolution (HR) counterpart. We aim to address this by introducing Super-Resolution Generator (SuRGe), a fully-convolutional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based architecture for SR. We show that distinct convolutional features obtained at increasing depths of a GAN generator can be optimally combined by a set of learnable convex weights to improve the quality of generated SR samples. In the process, we employ the Jensen-Shannon and the Gromov-Wasserstein losses respectively between the SR-HR and LR-SR pairs of distributions to further aid the generator of SuRGe to better exploit the available information in an attempt to improve SR. Moreover, we train the discriminator of SuRGe with the Wasserstein loss with gradient penalty, to primarily prevent mode collapse. The proposed SuRGe, as an end-to-end GAN workflow tailor-made for super-resolution, offers improved performance while maintaining low inference time. The efficacy of SuRGe is substantiated by its superior performance compared to 28 state-of-the-art contenders on 10 benchmark datasets.