Few-shot android malware classification with quantum-enhanced prototypical learning and drift detection.

Android malware detection systems face critical challenges including data scarcity for emerging threat families, high-dimensional feature spaces, and concept drift caused by evolving attack techniques. Traditional machine learning approaches require extensive labeled datasets and frequent retraining, limiting their practical deployment against rapidly emerging threats. This paper proposes an adaptive few-shot malware classification framework that integrates CatBoost-based feature selection, prototypical networks with episodic meta-learning, quantum-enhanced classification, concept drift detection, and explainable AI (XAI) analysis using SHAP and LIME. The CatBoost feature selection reduces dimensionality by 99.46% on CCCS-CIC-AndMal-2020 (9,503 to 51 features) and 94.07% on KronoDroid (489 to 29 features) while preserving discriminative information. The prototypical network learns metric-based representations enabling classification with only 5 support samples per class. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with 99.70% accuracy on CCCS-CIC-AndMal-2020 (15 malware families) and 99.33% accuracy on KronoDroid (binary classification), outperforming existing methods by 0.70-9.70%. The framework exhibits robust temporal stability with maximum accuracy degradation of 0.24% across evaluation periods. XAI analysis reveals that file descriptor manipulation and file system operations are the most discriminative features for malware detection. These results establish few-shot prototypical learning with intelligent feature selection as an effective paradigm for practical malware detection requiring minimal annotation, interpretable decisions, and stable long-term performance.