Making Logic a First-Class Citizen in Generative ML for Networking

Abstract

Generative ML models are increasingly popular in networking for tasks such as telemetry imputation, prediction, and synthetic trace generation. Despite their capabilities, they suffer from two shortcomings: \emph{(i)} their output is often visibly violating well-known networking rules, which undermines their trustworthiness; and \emph{(ii)} they are difficult to control, frequently requiring retraining even for minor changes. To address these limitations and unlock the benefits of generative models for networking, we propose a new paradigm for integrating explicit network knowledge, in the form of first-order logic rules, into ML models used for networking tasks. Rules capture well-known relationships among observed signals, e.g., that increased latency precedes packet loss. While the idea is conceptually straightforward, its realization is challenging: networking knowledge is rarely formalized into rules, and naively injecting rules into ML models often hampers their effectiveness. This paper introduces NetNomos, a multi-stage framework that \emph{(i)} learns rules directly from data (e.g., measurements); \emph{(ii)} filters them to select semantically meaningful ones; and \emph{(iii)} enforces them through collaborative generation between an ML model and a Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver. %We evaluate NetNomos both component-wise and end-to-end across four diverse network datasets. We show that NetNomos learns diverse, meaningful rules from four real-world datasets and is 1.6--6.5$\times$ more scalable than DuoAI, a state-of-the-art (SOTA) rule-learning method. By enforcing these rules on a generic GPT-2 model, NetNomos achieves performance on par with or even surpassing specialized SOTA systems such as Zoom2Net and NetShare across three networking tasks: telemetry imputation, traffic forecasting, and synthetic data generation.