A Transformer-Based Conditional GAN with Multiple Instance Learning for UAV Signal Detection and Classification

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in surveillance, logistics, agriculture, disaster management, and military operations. Accurate detection and classification of UAV flight states, such as hovering, cruising, ascending, or transitioning, which are essential for safe and effective operations. However, conventional time series classification (TSC) methods often lack robustness and generalization for dynamic UAV environments, while state of the art(SOTA) models like Transformers and LSTM based architectures typically require large datasets and entail high computational costs, especially with high-dimensional data streams. This paper proposes a novel framework that integrates a Transformer-based Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) with Multiple Instance Locally Explainable Learning (MILET) to address these challenges in UAV flight state classification. The Transformer encoder captures long-range temporal dependencies and complex telemetry dynamics, while the GAN module augments limited datasets with realistic synthetic samples. MIL is incorporated to focus attention on the most discriminative input segments, reducing noise and computational overhead. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves superior accuracy 96.5% on the DroneDetect dataset and 98.6% on the DroneRF dataset that outperforming other SOTA approaches. The framework also demonstrates strong computational efficiency and robust generalization across diverse UAV platforms and flight states, highlighting its potential for real-time deployment in resource constrained environments.