Towards Multi-System Log Anomaly Detection

Boyang Wang, Runqiang Zang, Hongcheng Guo, Shun Zhang, Shaosheng Cao, Donglin Di, Zhoujun Li


Abstract
Despite advances in unsupervised log anomaly detection, current models require dataset-specific training, causing costly procedures, limited scalability, and performance bottlenecks. Furthermore, numerous models lack cognitive reasoning abilities, limiting their transferability to similar systems. Additionally, these models often encounter the **“identical shortcut”** predicament, erroneously predicting normal classes when confronted with rare anomaly logs due to reconstruction errors. To address these issues, we propose **MLAD**, a novel **M**ulti-system **L**og **A**nomaly **D**etection model incorporating semantic relational reasoning. Specifically, we extract cross-system semantic patterns and encode them as high-dimensional learnable vectors. Subsequently, we revamp attention formulas to discern keyword significance and model the overall distribution through vector space diffusion. Lastly, we employ a Gaussian mixture model to highlight rare word uncertainty, optimizing the vector space with maximum expectation. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of MLAD.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-industry.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Georg Rehm, Yunyao Li
Venue:
ACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
83–91
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-industry.8/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Boyang Wang, Runqiang Zang, Hongcheng Guo, Shun Zhang, Shaosheng Cao, Donglin Di, and Zhoujun Li. 2025. Towards Multi-System Log Anomaly Detection. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track), pages 83–91, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Multi-System Log Anomaly Detection (Wang et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-industry.8.pdf