AdaptiveLog: An Adaptive Log Analysis Framework with the Collaboration of Large and Small Language Model
Lipeng Ma, Weidong Yang, Yixuan Li, Ben Fei, Mingjie Zhou, Shuhao Li, Sihang Jiang, Bo Xu, Yanghua Xiao · ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology · 2025
Automated log analysis is crucial to ensure the high availability and reliability of complex systems. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has ushered in a new era of language model-driven automated log analysis, garnering significant interest. Within this field, two primary paradigms based on language models for log analysis have become prominent. Small Language Models (SLMs) (such as BERT) follow the pre-train and fine-tune paradigm, focusing on the specific log analysis task through fine-tuning on supervised datasets. On the other hand, LLMs (such as ChatGPT) following the in-context learning paradigm, analyze logs by providing a few examples in prompt contexts without updating parameters. Despite their respective strengths, both models exhibit inherent limitations. By comparing SLMs and LLMs, we notice that SLMs are more cost-effective but less powerful, whereas LLMs with large parameters are highly powerful but expensive and inefficient. To tradeoff between the performance and inference costs of both models in automated log analysis, this article introduces an adaptive log analysis framework known as AdaptiveLog, which effectively reduces the costs associated with LLM while ensuring superior results. This framework collaborates an LLM and an SLM, strategically allocating the LLM to tackle complex logs while delegating simpler logs to the SLM. Specifically, to efficiently query the LLM, we propose an adaptive selection strategy based on the uncertainty estimation of the SLM, where the LLM is invoked only when the SLM is uncertain. In addition, to enhance the reasoning ability of the LLM in log analysis tasks, we propose a novel prompt strategy by retrieving similar error-prone cases as the reference, enabling the model to leverage past error experiences and learn solutions from these cases. We evaluate AdaptiveLog on different log analysis tasks, Extensive experiments demonstrate that AdaptiveLog achieves state-of-the-art results across different tasks, elevating the overall accuracy of log analysis while maintaining cost efficiency. Our source code and detailed experimental data are available at https://github.com/LeaperOvO/AdaptiveLog-review .