TY  - EJOU
AU  - Li, Caiyun 
AU  - Liu, Xiaowen 
AU  - Tang, Binhui 
AU  - Lu, Tingting 
AU  - Xiao, Daibo 
AU  - Chen, Li 

TI  - RSTD-KD: A Task-Cost-Aware Approach for UAV Communication Risk Warning via Knowledge Distillation
T2  - Computers, Materials \& Continua

PY  - 
VL  - 
IS  - 
SN  - 1546-2226

AB  - Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication links in low-altitude operations support mission control, status feedback, and data transmission. Abnormal communication states may affect mission continuity and risk response. However, conventional anomaly detection usually determines only whether a communication anomaly exists, making it difficult to support risk-state assessment and alert-threshold decision-making. To address this problem, this paper proposes Risk Stratification and Task-cost-aware Decision via Knowledge Distillation (RSTD-KD), a task-cost-aware UAV communication risk warning approach that integrates risk stratification, probability calibration, and threshold decision-making. RSTD-KD aggregates fine-grained communication records into window-level behavior samples, constructs low-, medium-, and high-risk reference states, and introduces distillation-guided risk stratification to transfer binary anomaly-boundary information and soft attack-probability supervision into three-level risk-state learning. The estimated attack probabilities are then calibrated for threshold search and cost calculation. Cross-sea logistics and general aviation inspection are used as representative task-cost scenarios to examine the effect of false-positive and false-negative costs on alert-threshold selection. Experiments on the public ECU-IoFT dataset show that RSTD-KD achieves 93.75% Accuracy, 96.44% Balanced Accuracy, and 94.65% Macro-F1. Platt Scaling reduces the Brier Score from 0.0762 to 0.0113. In the additional external-dataset portability evaluation on UAVIDS-2025, RSTD-KD achieves 94.92% Accuracy and 94.38% Macro-F1 across five random seeds, providing further evidence of the portability of RSTD-KD under different UAV communication data granularity and attack taxonomy. These results show that RSTD-KD provides an effective path for converting UAV communication detection outputs into risk states, calibrated attack probabilities, and task-oriented alert decisions.
KW  - UAV communication intrusion detection; knowledge distillation; risk stratification; probability calibration; task-cost-aware threshold decision-making

DO  - 10.32604/cmc.2026.086522