# Convolutional vs Large Language Models for Software Log Classification in Edge-Deployable Cellular Network Testing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03759 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03759/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13138/) (2022)
- [Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14062/) (2020)
- [LogBERT: Log Anomaly Detection via BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04475/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised and Semi-supervised Anomaly Detection with LSTM Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09207/) (2017)
- [Understanding Telecom Language Through Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07933/) (2023)
- [LAnoBERT: System Log Anomaly Detection based on BERT Masked Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09564/) (2021)
- [Robust and Transferable Anomaly Detection in Log Data using Pre-Trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11570/) (2021)
- [Linnaeus: A highly reusable and adaptable ML based log classification pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06927/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Software logs generated by sophisticated network emulators in the telecommunications industry, such as VIAVI TM500, are extremely complex, often comprising tens of thousands of text lines with minimal resemblance to natural language. Only specialised expert engineers can decipher such logs and troubleshoot defects in test runs. While AI offers a promising solution for automating defect triage, potentially leading to massive revenue savings for companies, state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) suffer from significant drawbacks in this specialised domain. These include a constrained context window, limited applicability to text beyond natural language, and high inference costs. To address these limitations, we propose a compact convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that offers a context window spanning up to 200,000 characters and achieves over 96% accuracy (F1>0.9) in classifying multifaceted software logs into various layers in the telecommunications protocol stack. Specifically, the proposed model is capable of identifying defects in test runs and triaging them to the relevant department, formerly a manual engineering process that required expert knowledge. We evaluate several LLMs; LLaMA2-7B, Mixtral 8x7B, Flan-T5, BERT and BigBird, and experimentally demonstrate their shortcomings in our specialized application. Despite being lightweight, our CNN significantly outperforms LLM-based approaches in telecommunications log classification while minimizing the cost of production. Our defect triaging AI model is deployable on edge devices without dedicated hardware and widely applicable across software logs in various industries.