LogDLR

Unsupervised Cross-System Log Anomaly Detection Through Domain-Invariant Latent Representation

Journal Article (2025)
Author(s)

Junwei Zhou (Wuhan University of Technology)

Shaowen Ying (Wuhan University of Technology)

Shulan Wang (Shenzhen Technology University)

Dongdong Zhao (Wuhan University of Technology)

Jianwen Xiang (Wuhan University of Technology)

Katai Liang (TU Delft - Cyber Security)

Peng Liu (The Pennsylvania State University)

Research Group
Cyber Security
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2025.3548050
More Info
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Publication Year
2025
Language
English
Research Group
Cyber Security
Bibliographical Note
Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository as part of the Taverne amendment. More information about this copyright law amendment can be found at https://www.openaccess.nl. Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public. @en
Issue number
4
Volume number
22
Pages (from-to)
4456-4471
Reuse Rights

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Abstract

Log anomaly detection aims to discover abnormal events from massive log data to ensure the security and reliability of software systems. However, due to the heterogeneity of log formats and syntaxes across different systems, existing log anomaly detection methods often need to be designed and trained for specific systems, lacking generalization ability. To address this challenge, we propose LogDLR, a novel unsupervised cross-system log anomaly detection method. The core idea of LogDLR is to use universal sentence embeddings and a Transformer-based autoencoder to extract domain-invariant latent representations from log entries, which can effectively adapt to log format changes and capture semantic information and dependencies in log sequences. To obtain domain-invariant latent representations, we adopt a domain-adversarial training strategy, introducing a domain discriminator that competes with the Transformer-based encoder through a gradient reversal layer, forcing the encoder to learn shared knowledge between different system logs. Finally, the Transformer-based decoder detects anomalies based on the domain-invariant representations obtained by the encoder. We evaluate LogDLR in simulated cross-system scenarios using three publicly available log datasets. The experimental results show that LogDLR can handle heterogeneous logs effectively in cross-system scenarios and achieve efficient and accurate anomaly detection on both source and target systems.

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File under embargo until 15-09-2025