Learning Representations on Logs for AIOps

AI for IT Operations (AIOps) is a powerful platform that Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) use to automate and streamline operational workflows with minimal human intervention. Automated log analysis is a critical task in AIOps as it provides key insights for SREs to identify and address ongoing faults. Tasks such as log format detection, log classification, and log parsing are key components of automated log analysis. Most of these tasks require supervised learning; however, there are multiple challenges due to limited labelled log data and the diverse nature of log data. Large Language Models (LLMs) such as BERT and GPT3 are trained using self-supervision on a vast amount of unlabeled data. These models provide generalized representations that can be effectively used for various downstream tasks with limited labelled data. Motivated by the success of LLMs in specific domains like science and biology, this paper introduces a LLM for log data which is trained on public and proprietary log data. The results of our experiments demonstrate that the proposed LLM outperforms existing models on multiple downstream tasks. In summary, AIOps powered by LLMs offers an efficient and effective solution for automating log analysis tasks and enabling SREs to focus on higher-level tasks. Our proposed LLM, trained on public and proprietary log data, offers superior performance on multiple downstream tasks, making it a valuable addition to the AIOps platform.

Forecasting local behavior of multi-agent system and its application to forest fire model

In this paper, we study a CNN-LSTM model to forecast the state of a specific agent in a large multi-agent system. The proposed model consists of a CNN encoder to represent the system into a low-dimensional vector, a LSTM module to learn the agent dynamics in the vector space, and a MLP decoder to predict the future state of an agent. A forest fire model is considered as an example where we need to predict when a specific tree agent will be burning. We observe that the proposed model achieves higher AUC with less computation than a frame-based model and significantly saves computational costs such as the activation than ConvLSTM.

Picking Pearl From Seabed: Extracting Artefacts from Noisy Issue Triaging Collaborative Conversations for Hybrid Cloud Services

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) play a key role in issue identification and resolution. After an issue is reported, SREs come together in a virtual room (collaboration platform) to triage the issue. While doing so, they leave behind a wealth of information which can be used later for triaging similar issues. However, usability of the conversations offer challenges due to them being i) noisy and ii) unlabelled. This paper presents a novel approach for issue artefact extraction from the noisy conversations with minimal labelled data. We propose a combination of unsupervised and supervised model with minimum human intervention that leverages domain knowledge to predict artefacts for a small amount of conversation data and use that for fine-tuning an already pretrained language model for artefact prediction on a large amount of conversation data. Experimental results on our dataset show that the proposed ensemble of unsupervised and supervised model is better than using either one of them individually.

Towards Improving the Trustworthiness of Hardware based Malware Detector using Online Uncertainty Estimation

Hardware-based Malware Detectors (HMDs) using Machine Learning (ML) models have shown promise in detecting malicious workloads. However, the conventional black-box based machine learning (ML) approach used in these HMDs fail to address the uncertain predictions, including those made on zero-day malware. The ML models used in HMDs are agnostic to the uncertainty that determines whether the model "knows what it knows," severely undermining its trustworthiness. We propose an ensemble-based approach that quantifies uncertainty in predictions made by ML models of an HMD, when it encounters an unknown workload than the ones it was trained on. We test our approach on two different HMDs that have been proposed in the literature. We show that the proposed uncertainty estimator can detect >90% of unknown workloads for the Power-management based HMD, and conclude that the overlapping benign and malware classes undermine the trustworthiness of the Performance Counter-based HMD.

FIXME: Enhance Software Reliability with Hybrid Approaches in Cloud

With the promise of reliability in cloud, more enterprises are migrating to cloud. The process of continuous integration/deployment (CICD) in cloud connects developers who need to deliver value faster and more transparently with site reliability engineers (SREs) who need to manage applications reliably. SREs feed back development issues to developers, and developers commit fixes and trigger CICD to redeploy. The release cycle is more continuous than ever, thus the code to production is faster and more automated. To provide this higher level agility, the cloud platforms become more complex in the face of flexibility with deeper layers of virtualization. However, reliability does not come for free with all these complexities. Software engineers and SREs need to deal with wider information spectrum from virtualized layers. Therefore, providing correlated information with true positive evidences is critical to identify the root cause of issues quickly in order to reduce mean time to recover (MTTR), performance metrics for SREs. Similarity, knowledge, or statistics driven approaches have been effective, but with increasing data volume and types, an individual approach is limited to correlate semantic relations of different data sources. In this paper, we introduce FIXME to enhance software reliability with hybrid diagnosis approaches for enterprises. Our evaluation results show using hybrid diagnosis approach is about 17% better in precision. The results are helpful for both practitioners and researchers to develop hybrid diagnosis in the highly dynamic cloud environment.

Multifaceted Context Representation using Dual Attention for Ontology Alignment

Ontology Alignment is an important research problem that finds application in various fields such as data integration, data transfer, data preparation etc. State-of-the-art (SOTA) architectures in Ontology Alignment typically use naive domain-dependent approaches with handcrafted rules and manually assigned values, making them unscalable and inefficient. Deep Learning approaches for ontology alignment use domain-specific architectures that are not only in-extensible to other datasets and domains, but also typically perform worse than rule-based approaches due to various limitations including over-fitting of models, sparsity of datasets etc. In this work, we propose VeeAlign, a Deep Learning based model that uses a dual-attention mechanism to compute the contextualized representation of a concept in order to learn alignments. By doing so, not only does our approach exploit both syntactic and semantic structure of ontologies, it is also, by design, flexible and scalable to different domains with minimal effort. We validate our approach on various datasets from different domains and in multilingual settings, and show its superior performance over SOTA methods.

Neural Conversational QA: Learning to Reason v.s. Exploiting Patterns

In this paper we work on the recently introduced ShARC task - a challenging form of conversational QA that requires reasoning over rules expressed in natural language. Attuned to the risk of superficial patterns in data being exploited by neural models to do well on benchmark tasks (Niven and Kao 2019), we conduct a series of probing experiments and demonstrate how current state-of-the-art models rely heavily on such patterns. To prevent models from learning based on the superficial clues, we modify the dataset by automatically generating new instances reducing the occurrences of those patterns. We also present a simple yet effective model that learns embedding representations to incorporate dialog history along with the previous answers to follow-up questions. We find that our model outperforms existing methods on all metrics, and the results show that the proposed model is more robust in dealing with spurious patterns and learns to reason meaningfully.

Dialogue Act Sequence Labeling using Hierarchical encoder with CRF

Dialogue Act recognition associate dialogue acts (i.e., semantic labels) to utterances in a conversation. The problem of associating semantic labels to utterances can be treated as a sequence labeling problem. In this work, we build a hierarchical recurrent neural network using bidirectional LSTM as a base unit and the conditional random field (CRF) as the top layer to classify each utterance into its corresponding dialogue act. The hierarchical network learns representations at multiple levels, i.e., word level, utterance level, and conversation level. The conversation level representations are input to the CRF layer, which takes into account not only all previous utterances but also their dialogue acts, thus modeling the dependency among both, labels and utterances, an important consideration of natural dialogue. We validate our approach on two different benchmark data sets, Switchboard and Meeting Recorder Dialogue Act, and show performance improvement over the state-of-the-art methods by $2.2\%$ and $4.1\%$ absolute points, respectively. It is worth noting that the inter-annotator agreement on Switchboard data set is $84\%$, and our method is able to achieve the accuracy of about $79\%$ despite being trained on the noisy data.