Alberto Acuto

Alberto Acuto, Paola Barillà, Ludovico Bozzolo et al.

Deep Reinforcement Learning is emerging as a promising approach for the continuous control task of robotic arm movement. However, the challenges of learning robust and versatile control capabilities are still far from being resolved for real-world applications, mainly because of two common issues of this learning paradigm: the exploration strategy and the slow learning speed, sometimes known as "the curse of dimensionality". This work aims at exploring and assessing the advantages of the application of Quantum Computing to one of the state-of-art Reinforcement Learning techniques for continuous control - namely Soft Actor-Critic. Specifically, the performance of a Variational Quantum Soft Actor-Critic on the movement of a virtual robotic arm has been investigated by means of digital simulations of quantum circuits. A quantum advantage over the classical algorithm has been found in terms of a significant decrease in the amount of required parameters for satisfactory model training, paving the way for further promising developments.

Wanrong Yang, Alberto Acuto, Yihang Zhou et al.

Cyber-attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated and frequent, highlighting the importance of network intrusion detection systems. This paper explores the potential and challenges of using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in network intrusion detection. It begins by introducing key DRL concepts and frameworks, such as deep Q-networks and actor-critic algorithms, and reviews recent research utilizing DRL for intrusion detection. The study evaluates challenges related to model training efficiency, detection of minority and unknown class attacks, feature selection, and handling unbalanced datasets. The performance of DRL models is comprehensively analyzed, showing that while DRL holds promise, many recent technologies remain underexplored. Some DRL models achieve state-of-the-art results on public datasets, occasionally outperforming traditional deep learning methods. The paper concludes with recommendations for enhancing DRL deployment and testing in real-world network scenarios, with a focus on Internet of Things intrusion detection. It discusses recent DRL architectures and suggests future policy functions for DRL-based intrusion detection. Finally, the paper proposes integrating DRL with generative methods to further improve performance, addressing current gaps and supporting more robust and adaptive network intrusion detection systems.