arXiv Machine Learning By Fernando Martinez, Abhishek Satyam, Tao Li, Junaid Farooq, Ying Wang, Juntao Chen

Ask the Expert: LLM-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Cyber Defense

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The paper introduces Ask the Expert, a training-time framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to guide reinforcement learning for autonomous cyber defense. It summarizes complex cyber‑defense states, intermittently queries an LLM for host‑level defensive recommendations via a constrained action interface, and then uses those recommendations to shape rewards for PPO training. After training, the LLM is discarded, leaving a pure RL policy that improves sample efficiency and outperforms potential‑based reward shaping baselines on TTCP CAGE CC1 and CC2 scenarios.

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