ThinkFL: Self-Refining Failure Localization for Microservice Systems via Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

As modern microservice systems grow increasingly popular and complex-often consisting of hundreds or even thousands of fine-grained, interdependent components-they are becoming more susceptible to frequent and subtle failures. Ensuring system reliability therefore hinges on accurate and efficient failure localization. Traditional failure localization approaches based on small models lack the flexibility to adapt to diverse failure scenarios, while recent LLM-based methods suffer from two major limitations: they often rely on rigid invocation workflows that constrain the model's ability to dynamically explore optimal localization paths, and they require resource-intensive inference, making them cost-prohibitive for real-world deployment. To address these challenges, we explore the use of reinforcement fine-tuning to equip lightweight LLMs with reasoning and self-refinement capabilities, significantly improving the cost-effectiveness and adaptability of LLM-based failure localization. We begin with an empirical study to identify three key capabilities essential for accurate localization. Building on these insights, we propose a progressive multi-stage GRPO fine-tuning framework, which integrates a multi-factor failure localization grader and a recursion-of-thought actor module. The resulting model, ThinkFL, not only outperforms existing state-of-the-art LLMs and baseline methods in localization accuracy but also reduces end-to-end localization latency from minutes to seconds, demonstrating strong potential for real-world applications.