EvoCause: LLM-Guided Evolution of Causal Graphs for Root Cause Analysis
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
Modern telecommunication, cloud, and microservice systems emit correlated alarm cascades when components fail. Root cause analysis (RCA) aims to identify the small set of alarms that initiate each cascade. A common approach learns a causal graph from observational logs and predicts all zero-in-degree alarms in each incident-induced subgraph. However, the learned graph remains fixed and cannot benefit from expert diagnoses of historical incidents. We close this loop with EvoCause. Expert labels constrain which alarms should be source nodes but do not specify the edge edits needed to satisfy those constraints. EvoCause uses a large language model (LLM) to propose semantically plausible graph edits, while deterministic code validates node identities and acyclicity and retains the best graph on a labeled alignment set. At test time, the refined graph alone produces transparent predictions without an LLM call. We also release TeleRCA, an expert-annotated benchmark from a production telecommunication network containing 485,681 alarm events spanning 194 alarm types over 5,621 resources. On synthetic data, EvoCause initialized with the PC causal discovery algorithm outperforms the unrefined PC baseline, raising Node F1, Case EM, and Graph F1 by 11.59, 9.40, and 4.59 percentage points, respectively, while reducing nSHD by 0.2379. On TeleRCA, replacing human-readable alarm titles with anonymous identifiers lowers Node F1 and Case EM by 6.12 and 8.04 percentage points, respectively, indicating that alarm-name information contributes to graph refinement.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 14 of its 31 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Jul 2026.
Builds on
14 of 31 references.
References · 14
- 2018DAGs with NO TEARS: Continuous Optimization for Structure Learningcited by 752
- 2023Automatic Root Cause Analysis via Large Language Models for Cloud Incidentscited by 84
- 2013Learning Equivalence Classes of Bayesian Networks Structurescited by 77
- 2024Root Cause Analysis In Microservice Using Neural Granger Causal Discoverycited by 32
- 2023Root Cause Identification for Collective Anomalies in Time Series given an Acyclic Summary Causal Graph with Loopscited by 30
- 2021THP: Topological Hawkes Processes for Learning Causal Structure on Event Sequencescited by 19
- 2021Groot: An Event-graph-based Approach for Root Cause Analysis in Industrial Settingscited by 15
- 2023Case Studies of Causal Discovery from IT Monitoring Time Seriescited by 14
- 2024Cloud Atlas: Efficient Fault Localization for Cloud Systems using Language Models and Causal Insightcited by 12
- 2021An Influence-based Approach for Root Cause Alarm Discovery in Telecom Networkscited by 10
- 2023CausIL: Causal Graph for Instance Level Microservice Datacited by 9
- 2022On the Representation of Pairwise Causal Background Knowledge and Its Applications in Causal Inferencecited by 5
Built on by
Not cited yet.