# OWL: A Large Language Model for IT Operations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.09298 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09298/

## Key facts

- Cited by 43 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12950/) (2023)
- [WizardLM: Empowering large pre-trained language models to follow complex instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12244/) (2023)
- [LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11206/) (2023)
- [Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12588/) (2022)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [BloombergGPT: A Large Language Model for Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17564/) (2023)
- [Towards a Unified View of Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04366/) (2021)
- [Galactica: A Large Language Model for Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09085/) (2022)
- [WizardCoder: Empowering Code Large Language Models with Evol-Instruct](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08568/) (2023)
- [C-Eval: A Multi-Level Multi-Discipline Chinese Evaluation Suite for Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08322/) (2023)
- [TrOCR: Transformer-based Optical Character Recognition with Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10282/) (2021)
- [FinGPT: Open-Source Financial Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06031/) (2023)
- [AdaMix: Mixture-of-Adaptations for Parameter-efficient Model Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17451/) (2022)
- [Scaling Laws for Generative Mixed-Modal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03728/) (2023)
- [Cross-Lingual Natural Language Generation via Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10481/) (2019)
- [A Brief Report on LawGPT 1.0: A Virtual Legal Assistant Based on GPT-3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05729/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [A Survey on Knowledge Distillation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13116/) (2024)
- [MT-Bench-101: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Multi-Turn Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14762/) (2024)
- [UI-TARS-2 Technical Report: Advancing GUI Agent with Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02544/) (2025)
- [MoVA: Adapting Mixture of Vision Experts to Multimodal Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13046/) (2024)
- [When LLMs Meet Cybersecurity: A Systematic Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03644/) (2024)
- [CTIBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Cyber Threat Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07599/) (2024)
- [D-CPT Law: Domain-specific Continual Pre-Training Scaling Law for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01375/) (2024)
- [mABC: multi-Agent Blockchain-Inspired Collaboration for root cause analysis in micro-services architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12135/) (2024)
- [PsycoLLM: Enhancing LLM for Psychological Understanding and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05721/) (2024)
- [DDK: Distilling Domain Knowledge for Efficient Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16154/) (2024)
- [C-ICL: Contrastive In-context Learning for Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11254/) (2024)
- [A Survey of AIOps in the Era of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12472/) (2025)
- [Lemur: Log Parsing with Entropy Sampling and Chain-of-Thought Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18205/) (2024)
- [IW-Bench: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Converting Image-to-Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18980/) (2024)
- [LogLM: From Task-based to Instruction-based Automated Log Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09352/) (2024)
- [SECURE: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Cybersecurity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20441/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Root Cause Localization for Microservice Systems with Multi-Agent Recursion-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20370/) (2025)
- [E^2-LLM: Efficient and Extreme Length Extension of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06951/) (2024)
- [ConceptMath: A Bilingual Concept-wise Benchmark for Measuring Mathematical Reasoning of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14660/) (2024)
- [R2C2-Coder: Enhancing and Benchmarking Real-world Repository-level Code Completion Abilities of Code Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01359/) (2024)
- [Agentic Memory Enhanced Recursive Reasoning for Root Cause Localization in Microservices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02732/) (2026)
- [Adapting Large Language Models to Log Analysis with Interpretable Domain Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01377/) (2024)
- [M2C: Towards Automatic Multimodal Manga Complement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17130/) (2023)
- [RAG4ITOps: A Supervised Fine-Tunable and Comprehensive RAG Framework for IT Operations and Maintenance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15805/) (2024)
- [Cluster-Driven Expert Pruning for Mixture-of-Experts Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07807/) (2025)
- [XMainframe: A Large Language Model for Mainframe Modernization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04660/) (2024)
- [CourseGPT-zh: an Educational Large Language Model Based on Knowledge Distillation Incorporating Prompt Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04781/) (2024)
- [ECLIPSE: Semantic Entropy-LCS for Cross-Lingual Industrial Log Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13548/) (2024)
- [AthenaBench: A Dynamic Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Cyber Threat Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01144/) (2025)
- [E2E-REME: Towards End-to-End Microservices Auto-Remediation via Experience-Simulation Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11094/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the rapid development of IT operations, it has become increasingly crucial to efficiently manage and analyze large volumes of data for practical applications. The techniques of Natural Language Processing (NLP) have shown remarkable capabilities for various tasks, including named entity recognition, machine translation and dialogue systems. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant improvements across various NLP downstream tasks. However, there is a lack of specialized LLMs for IT operations. In this paper, we introduce the OWL, a large language model trained on our collected OWL-Instruct dataset with a wide range of IT-related information, where the mixture-of-adapter strategy is proposed to improve the parameter-efficient tuning across different domains or tasks. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of our OWL on the OWL-Bench established by us and open IT-related benchmarks. OWL demonstrates superior performance results on IT tasks, which outperforms existing models by significant margins. Moreover, we hope that the findings of our work will provide more insights to revolutionize the techniques of IT operations with specialized LLMs.