--With the proliferation of smart grids, smart cities face growing challenges due to cyber-attacks and sophisticated electricity theft behaviors, particularly in residential photovoltaic (PV) generation systems. Traditional Electricity Theft Detection (ETD) methods often struggle to capture complex temporal dependencies and integrating multi-source data, limiting their effectiveness. In this work, we propose an efficient ETD method that accurately identifies fraudulent behaviors in residential PV generation, thus ensuring the supply-demand balance in smart cities. Additionally, we introduce a data embedding technique that seamlessly integrates time-series data with discrete temperature variables, enhancing detection robustness. With the widespread deployment of smart grids, modern power systems are increasingly vulnerable to cyber-attacks and evolving electricity theft behaviors [1].

In this work we propose a novel self-attention mechanism model to address electricity theft detection on an imbalanced realistic dataset that presents a daily electricity consumption provided by State Grid Corporation of China. Our key contribution is the introduction of a multi-head self-attention mechanism concatenated with dilated convolutions and unified by a convolution of kernel size $1$. Moreover, we introduce a binary input channel (Binary Mask) to identify the position of the missing values, allowing the network to learn how to deal with these values. Our model achieves an AUC of $0.926$ which is an improvement in more than $17\%$ with respect to previous baseline work. The code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/neuralmind-ai/electricity-theft-detection-with-self-attention.