arXiv subjects

Shenglin Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Shenglin Zhang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

OpsMem: Dual-Memory Reasoning with Cross-Memory Resonance for Failure Diagnosis

Failure diagnosis in modern software systems requires iterative evidence acquisition and hypothesis reasoning guided by operational experience. Existing LLM-based methods improve diagnosis through agentic reasoning or knowledge augmentation, but they often lack a mechanism to coordinate the evolving diagnostic state with operational experience during iterative diagnosis. We propose OpsMem, a dual-memory framework that maintains a short-term memory for the current diagnostic state and a long-term memory for reusable operational experience. OpsMem uses cross-memory resonance to activate state-relevant long-term memory, conditions multi-agent diagnosis on the short-term and activated long-term memories, and consolidates reusable experience from solved incidents back into long-term memory. Experiments on a real-world Huawei microservice failure diagnosis dataset show that OpsMem outperforms representative agentic-reasoning and knowledge-augmented baselines, improving Match and Relevant by up to 46.88% and 18.39% over the strongest baseline, respectively.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

AgentTether: Graph-Guided Diagnosis and Runtime Intervention for Reliable LLM Agent Operation

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used for multi-step, stateful tool-use tasks, yet production reliability remains limited. Unlike static software repair, agent repair must recover dynamic trajectories whose early decisions can propagate into later errors and external state changes. Existing automatic remedies address only part of this problem: blind retry adds no diagnosis, outcome feedback says whether a run failed but not where or why, and self-reflection often lacks grounded evidence to prevent the same failure from recurring. We present AgentTether, a run-time repair framework that automates post-run diagnosis and guided recovery without modifying the underlying agent or environment. AgentTether abstracts each run into Transition Units, links them through a dependency-aware Critical Transition Graph, and localizes failure-critical subtrajectories by combining an offline normal-behavior model with a run-local graph detector. It then converts the localized cause into behavior-scoped guidance backed by cross-iteration Repair Memory, and can optionally apply guarded run-time intervention to keep the correction active during re-execution. The same design can be deployed as an offline diagnostic-and-guidance tool or as an online repair layer. We evaluate AgentTether on 261 tau-bench tasks across three domains with Qwen3.7-max, and test cross-model transfer on Banking with GPT-5.4. On the hardest Banking domain, AgentTether repairs 59.04% (49/83) of initially failed Qwen3.7-max tasks and 65.12% (56/86) of initially failed GPT-5.4 tasks. Overall, AgentTether improves repair effectiveness while reducing agent turns and end-to-end approach tokens, suggesting a practical reliability layer that can wrap existing agent deployments, reduce wasted re-execution, and improve recovery without retraining the agent.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

KRCA: An Efficient Root Cause Analysis System in Hyper-scale Microservice Systems via Agentic AI

Hyper-scale microservice systems have become the standard infrastructure for large-scale Internet companies. These systems consist of numerous loosely coupled microservices that evolve independently through continuous development and deployment. Such complexity makes failures unavoidable, necessitating efficient Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to help Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) quickly localize root cause services and classify failure types. However, existing RCA methods often struggle to adapt to the extreme dynamism and massive scale of these systems. In this paper, we present KRCA, an end-to-end RCA system designed for hyper-scale microservice systems. To manage the vast search space, KRCA employs a multi-stage pipeline that begins with an API-level drilldown to isolate suspicious services. It then instantiates a skeleton-based causal graph from anomalous metrics to serve as a high-recall structural prior, before utilizing a memory-augmented multi-agent framework to verify causality and generate the final failure report. By combining structured causal constraints with multi-agent reasoning, KRCA employs balances diagnostic accuracy with the efficiency requirements of real-time production use. Experimental results show that KRCA achieves AC@1 scores of 0.88 and 0.79 for root cause service localization and failure type classification, outperforming the strongest baseline by at lease 31% in absolute gains. KRCA has been deployed in Kuaishou's production environment for over six months, reducing the average diagnosis time by 77.3%.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

A Multi-Dataset Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Agents in Microservice Failure Diagnosis

LLM-based agents are reshaping microservice operations into AgentOps, where benchmarks are key to evaluating failure diagnosis over multimodal observability data. However, existing benchmarks remain largely outcome-oriented: they score only the final answer and fail to assess the systematic reasoning process in failure diagnosis. We address this gap by introducing two large-scale datasets (AIOps2025 and RCA100) under a reasoning-process evaluation paradigm that assesses agentic diagnostic capability along three dimensions: Localization (where the fault occurs), Identification (what type of fault it is), and Reason (whether the reasoning trace is grounded in relevant evidence). Together, the two datasets comprise over 500 expert-labeled failure cases across two representative microservice systems (HipsterShop and the OpenTelemetry Demo Store). They cover diverse fault scenarios across resource, network, runtime, middleware/database, and application-logic categories and provide fine-grained causal evidence to support agent learning and reasoning-process evaluation. Beyond scale and coverage, the datasets have been carefully labelled by domain experts and validated through large-scale competitions, supporting more than 6,000 participating teams. This makes them not only expert-labeled diagnostic datasets, but also competition-validated benchmarks for evaluating agentic failure diagnosis in real-world microservice environments. Datasets are available at https://www.aiops.cn/gitlab/aiops-live-benchmark/agenticopseval.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

EvidenT: An Evidence-Preserving Framework for Iterative System-Level Package Repair

Frequent toolchain updates and growing ISA diversity have made system-level software package repair increasingly important. Diagnosing and repairing build failures remains challenging because failures involve heterogeneous evidence, dependency constraints, and architecture-specific build conventions. While recent LLM-based repair methods show promise for project-level source fixes, they struggle with system-level repair, where failures span multi-language artifacts such as build recipes, scripts, and source archives, and require iterative validation through external build services. In this paper, we first conduct a systematic empirical study of real-world system-level build failures. We find that 72% of failures stem from dependency and environment misconfigurations rather than isolated code defects, suggesting that effective repair must prioritize packaging logic and iterative feedback. Motivated by these insights, we propose EvidenT, an evidence-preserving repair framework that decouples iteration-aware evidence management from tool execution. EvidenT includes: (1) an external Build Service for reproducible execution and feedback; (2) an Evidence-Preserving Repair Controller that fuses repair history, knowledge context, and build artifacts; and (3) an automated Repair Orchestrator that invokes modular tools for failure localization and system-level repair in a closed-loop validation environment. We evaluate EvidenT on 219 real-world RISC-V package build failures. EvidenT repairs 118 packages (53.88%), outperforming state-of-the-art agentic baselines (20.55%) and direct LLM-based repair (1.83%). To assess architectural generality, we extend EvidenT to legacy ISAs by updating only ISA-specific knowledge context. Preliminary experiments achieve success rates of 41.77% on aarch64 and 46.99% on x86_64, demonstrating robustness across diverse hardware ecosystems.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Debugging the Debuggers: Failure-Anchored Structured Recovery for Software Engineering Agents

Software engineering agents are increasingly deployed in evaluable engineering environments, yet post-failure recovery remains costly, manual, and ad hoc. Existing systems expose traces or generate follow-up feedback, but they do not convert heterogeneous runtime evidence into grounded, bounded recovery guidance for a subsequent attempt. We present PROBE, a failure-anchored framework for structured recovery in software engineering agents. PROBE organizes failed-run telemetry into structured evidence, structured diagnosis, and bounded recovery guidance through a Telemetry Layer, a Diagnosis Layer, and a Guidance Gate. The Telemetry Layer preserves fine-grained runtime signals, the Diagnosis Layer fuses cross-signal evidence into grounded diagnoses, and the Guidance Gate produces diagnosis-derived guidance only when it is evidence-grounded, actionable, and within the scope of agent-side behavior. We evaluate PROBE across three settings: repository-level software repair, enterprise workflow recovery, and AIOps service mitigation. On 257 initially unresolved cases, PROBE achieves 65.37% Top-1 diagnosis accuracy and a 21.79% recovery rate, outperforming the strongest non-PROBE baseline by 43.58 and 12.45 percentage points. The results reveal a diagnosis-recovery gap: accurate diagnosis is necessary but insufficient unless translated into bounded guidance that a subsequent attempt can execute and verify. Beyond controlled evaluation, a Microsoft IcM prototype shows that PROBE can attach as a non-intrusive side channel to existing service-diagnosis workflows without changing the agent policy, toolset, or execution budget. These results suggest that telemetry-grounded, failure-anchored recovery can improve post-failure recoverability under realistic engineering constraints.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Which Types of Heterogeneity Matter for Root Cause Localization in Microservice Systems ?

Microservice root cause localization is fundamentally challenged by the inherent heterogeneity of cloud-native systems, which encompasses diverse observability data and multiple system entities. Existing approaches typically focus on only one aspect of heterogeneity and thus fail to capture its full diagnostic value. In this work, we systematically examine the multifaceted role of heterogeneity within both microservice systems and the RCL process. This analysis motivates a deeper investigation into how entity-level distinctions and their asymmetric dependencies influence fault behavior. Our empirical analysis of two microservice benchmarks reveals that entity-level heterogeneity naturally gives rise to heterogeneous fault propagation, which is highly asymmetric and dominated by cross-layer interactions between services and hosts. In light of this, we propose NexusRCL, a semi-supervised framework that internalizes these propagation patterns by formalizing services and hosts as distinct node types within a heterogeneous graph. This design, coupled with an event-based abstraction mechanism, allows NexusRCL to effectively capture both data level and entity-level heterogeneity while minimizing labeling costs through active learning. Comprehensive evaluations on two industrial benchmark datasets demonstrate NexusRCL's superior performance, achieving improvements of up to 49.85\% in Top-1 accuracy (A@1) and 32.70\% in Average Top-5 accuracy (A@5) compared to state-of-the-art methods.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Graph of States: Solving Abductive Tasks with Large Language Models

Logical reasoning encompasses deduction, induction, and abduction. However, while Large Language Models (LLMs) have effectively mastered the former two, abductive reasoning remains significantly underexplored. Existing frameworks, predominantly designed for static deductive tasks, fail to generalize to abductive reasoning due to unstructured state representation and lack of explicit state control. Consequently, they are inevitably prone to Evidence Fabrication, Context Drift, Failed Backtracking, and Early Stopping. To bridge this gap, we introduce Graph of States (GoS), a general-purpose neuro-symbolic framework tailored for abductive tasks. GoS grounds multi-agent collaboration in a structured belief states, utilizing a causal graph to explicitly encode logical dependencies and a state machine to govern the valid transitions of the reasoning process. By dynamically aligning the reasoning focus with these symbolic constraints, our approach transforms aimless, unconstrained exploration into a convergent, directed search. Extensive evaluations on two real-world datasets demonstrate that GoS significantly outperforms all baselines, providing a robust solution for complex abductive tasks. Code repo and all prompts: https://github.com/gaorch85/Graph-of-States.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

LongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfaces

Recent advances in AI-assisted programming have empowered agents to execute complex workflows via command-line interfaces, however, existing benchmarks are limited by short task horizons, data contamination from GitHub scraping, and a lack of fine-grained evaluation metrics, fail to rigorously evaluate the long-horizon planning and execution capabilities essential for realistic software engineering. To address these gaps, we introduce LongCLI-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate agentic capabilities across long-horizon, realistic tasks. We curated 20 high-quality, long-horizon tasks from over 1,000 computer science assignments and real-world workflows, covering four engineering categories: from scratch, feature addition, bug fixing, and refactoring. We propose a dual-set testing protocol for LongCLI-Bench, which measures requirement fulfillment (fail-to-pass) and regression avoidance (pass-to-pass), and incorporates step-level scoring to pinpoint execution failures. Extensive experiments reveal that even state-of-the-art agents achieve pass rates below 20% in LongCLI-Bench. Step-level analysis further indicates that the majority of tasks stall at less than 30% completion, highlighting that critical failures often occur in the early stages. Although self-correction offers marginal gains, human-agent collaboration through plan injection and interactive guidance yields significantly higher improvements. These results highlight that future research must emphasize the development of synergistic human-agent workflows alongside advances in agents' planning and execution capabilities to overcome key challenges in long-horizon task performance.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

A Benchmark for Language Models in Real-World System Building

During migration across instruction set architectures (ISAs), software package build repair is a critical task for ensuring the reliability of software deployment and the stability of modern operating systems. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in tackling this challenge, prior work has primarily focused on single instruction set architecture (ISA) and homogeneous programming languages. To address this limitation, we introduce a new benchmark designed for software package build repair across diverse architectures and languages. Comprising 268 real-world software package build failures, the benchmark provides a standardized evaluation pipeline. We evaluate six state-of-the-art LLMs on the benchmark, and the results show that cross-ISA software package repair remains difficult and requires further advances. By systematically exposing this challenge, the benchmark establishes a foundation for advancing future methods aimed at improving software portability and bridging architectural gaps.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

LogPurge: Log Data Purification for Anomaly Detection via Rule-Enhanced Filtering

Log anomaly detection, which is critical for identifying system failures and preempting security breaches, detects irregular patterns within large volumes of log data, and impacts domains such as service reliability, performance optimization, and database log analysis. Modern log anomaly detection methods rely on training deep learning models on clean, anomaly-free log sequences. However, obtaining such clean log data requires costly and tedious human labeling, and existing automatic cleaning methods fail to fully integrate the specific characteristics and actual semantics of logs in their purification process. In this paper, we propose a cost-aware, rule-enhanced purification framework, LogPurge, that automatically selects a sufficient subset of normal log sequences from contamination log sequences to train a anomaly detection model. Our approach involves a two-stage filtering algorithm: In the first stage, we use a large language model (LLM) to remove clustered anomalous patterns and enhance system rules to improve LLM's understanding of system logs; in the second stage, we utilize a divide-and-conquer strategy that decomposes the remaining contaminated regions into smaller subproblems, allowing each to be effectively purified through the first stage procedure. Our experiments, conducted on two public datasets and one industrial dataset, show that our method significantly removes an average of 98.74% of anomalies while retaining 82.39% of normal samples. Compared to the latest unsupervised log sample selection algorithms, our method achieves F-1 score improvements of 35.7% and 84.11% on the public datasets, and an impressive 149.72% F-1 improvement on the private dataset, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Triage in Software Engineering: A Systematic Review of Research and Practice

As modern software systems continue to grow in complexity, triage has become a fundamental process in system operations and maintenance. Triage aims to efficiently prioritize, assign, and assess issues to ensure the reliability of complex environments. The vast amount of heterogeneous data generated by software systems has made effective triage indispensable for maintaining reliability, facilitating maintainability, and enabling rapid issue response. Motivated by these challenges, researchers have devoted extensive effort to advancing triage automation and have achieved significant progress over the past two decades. This survey provides a comprehensive review of 234 papers from 2004 to the present, offering an in-depth examination of the fundamental concepts, system architecture, and problem statement. By comparing the distinct goals of academic and industrial research and by analyzing empirical studies of industrial practices, we identify the major obstacles that limit the practical deployment of triage systems. To assist practitioners in method selection and performance evaluation, we summarize widely adopted open-source datasets and evaluation metrics, providing a unified perspective on the measurement of triage effectiveness. Finally, we outline potential future directions and emerging opportunities to foster a closer integration between academic innovation and industrial application. All reviewed papers and projects are available at https://github.com/AIOps-Lab-NKU/TriageSurvey.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Can Language Models Go Beyond Coding? Assessing the Capability of Language Models to Build Real-World Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have shown growing potential in software engineering, yet few benchmarks evaluate their ability to repair software during migration across instruction set architectures (ISAs). Cross-ISA migration, such as between x86_64 and aarch64, requires handling complex dependencies, heterogeneous toolchains, and long build logs while ensuring executable verification. To address this challenge, we present Build-bench, an end-to-end benchmark that systematically evaluates the capability of LLMs to repair build failures in cross-ISA settings. Build-bench collects 268 real-world failed packages and integrates auxiliary tools including Structure Extraction, File Content Extraction, Content Modification, and Build Verification to support autonomous, tool-augmented reasoning. The repair process operates in an iterative loop where, upon failure, the model receives updated build logs and previous repair outcomes to refine subsequent attempts. Through a comparative evaluation across the studied models, Build-bench reveals that current models achieve a maximum build success rate of 63.19% and tool usage patterns differ significantly across models. By coupling real build environments with verifiable outcomes, Build-bench establishes the first architecture-aware benchmark for studying LLM-based software build and repair.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

OpsAgent: An Evolving Multi-agent System for Incident Management in Microservices

Incident management (IM) is central to the reliability of large-scale microservice systems. Yet manual IM, where on-call engineers examine metrics, logs, and traces is labor-intensive and error-prone in the face of massive and heterogeneous observability data. Existing automated IM approaches often struggle to generalize across systems, provide limited interpretability, and incur high deployment costs, which hinders adoption in practice. In this paper, we present OpsAgent, a lightweight, self-evolving multi-agent system for IM that employs a training-free data processor to convert heterogeneous observability data into structured textual descriptions, along with a multi-agent collaboration framework that makes diagnostic inference transparent and auditable. To support continual capability growth, OpsAgent also introduces a dual self-evolution mechanism that integrates internal model updates with external experience accumulation, thereby closing the deployment loop. Comprehensive experiments on the OPENRCA benchmark demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and show that OpsAgent is generalizable, interpretable, cost-efficient, and self-evolving, making it a practically deployable and sustainable solution for long-term operation in real-world microservice systems. Notably, its deployment in Lenovo's production environment further validates its effectiveness in real-world industrial settings.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

R-Log: Incentivizing Log Analysis Capability in LLMs via Reasoning-based Reinforcement Learning

The growing complexity of log data in modern software systems has prompted the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated log analysis. Current approaches typically rely on direct supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on log-label pairs. However, this exacerbates the domain discrepancy between general-purpose LLMs and specialized log data, causing overfitting. Furthermore, SFT's imbalanced loss computation often allows lengthy contexts to overwhelm critical, concise details in model answers, leading to hallucinations. To address these limitations, we propose R-Log, a novel reasoning-based paradigm that mirrors the structured, step-by-step analytical process of human engineers. This approach enhances generalizability by learning the underlying rules behind conclusions. We further employ Reinforcement Learning (RL) to optimize the model within a simulated O&M environment, thereby reducing hallucinations by directly rewarding correct outcomes. R-Log is first cold-started on a curated dataset of 2k+ reasoning trajectories, guided by 13 strategies from manual O&M practices, to establish an initial reasoning capability. This ability is then refined via RL using a joint reward function. Empirical evaluations on real-world logs show that R-Log outperforms existing methods across five log analysis tasks, particularly in unseen scenarios (by 228.05%). We also designed R-Log-fast with 5x speedup while keeping 93% of the efficacy.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

RationAnomaly: Log Anomaly Detection with Rationality via Chain-of-Thought and Reinforcement Learning

Logs constitute a form of evidence signaling the operational status of software systems. Automated log anomaly detection is crucial for ensuring the reliability of modern software systems. However, existing approaches face significant limitations: traditional deep learning models lack interpretability and generalization, while methods leveraging Large Language Models are often hindered by unreliability and factual inaccuracies. To address these issues, we propose RationAnomaly, a novel framework that enhances log anomaly detection by synergizing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) fine-tuning with reinforcement learning. Our approach first instills expert-like reasoning patterns using CoT-guided supervised fine-tuning, grounded in a high-quality dataset corrected through a rigorous expert-driven process. Subsequently, a reinforcement learning phase with a multi-faceted reward function optimizes for accuracy and logical consistency, effectively mitigating hallucinations. Experimentally, RationAnomaly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving superior F1-scores on key benchmarks while providing transparent, step-by-step analytical outputs. We have released the corresponding resources, including code and datasets.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Enhancing Interpretability in Software Change Management with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

In modern online services, frequent software changes introduce significant risks. To tackle this challenge, we propose SCELM (Software Change Evaluation and Lifecycle Management), an end-to-end automated framework for software change management. SCELM aims to manage software changes efficiently and precisely, significantly reducing service failures and economic losses.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

ClusterRCA: An End-to-End Approach for Network Fault Localization and Classification for HPC System

Network failure diagnosis is challenging yet critical for high-performance computing (HPC) systems. Existing methods cannot be directly applied to HPC scenarios due to data heterogeneity and lack of accuracy. This paper proposes a novel framework, called ClusterRCA, to localize culprit nodes and determine failure types by leveraging multimodal data. ClusterRCA extracts features from topologically connected network interface controller (NIC) pairs to analyze the diverse, multimodal data in HPC systems. To accurately localize culprit nodes and determine failure types, ClusterRCA combines classifier-based and graph-based approaches. A failure graph is constructed based on the output of the state classifier, and then it performs a customized random walk on the graph to localize the root cause. Experiments on datasets collected by a top-tier global HPC device vendor show ClusterRCA achieves high accuracy in diagnosing network failure for HPC systems. ClusterRCA also maintains robust performance across different application scenarios.

cs.DC↗