AD-LLM: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Anomaly Detection

ACL ARR 2024 December Submission1133 Authors

15 Dec 2024 (modified: 05 Feb 2025)ACL ARR 2024 December SubmissionEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Abstract: Anomaly detection (AD) is an important machine learning task with many real-world uses, including fraud detection, medical diagnosis, and industrial monitoring. Within natural language processing (NLP), AD helps detect issues like spam, misinformation, and unusual user activity. Although large language models (LLMs) have had a strong impact on tasks such as text generation and summarization, their potential in AD has not been studied enough. This paper introduces AD-LLM, the first benchmark that evaluates how LLMs can help with NLP anomaly detection. We examine three key tasks: (i) zero-shot detection, using LLMs' pre-trained knowledge to perform AD without tasks-specific training; (ii) data augmentation, generating synthetic data and category descriptions to improve AD models; and (iii) model selection, using LLMs to suggest unsupervised AD models. Through experiments with different datasets, we find that LLMs can work well in zero-shot AD, that carefully designed augmentation methods are useful, and that explaining model selection for specific datasets remains challenging. Based on these results, we outline six future research directions on LLMs for AD.
Paper Type: Long
Research Area: Language Modeling
Research Area Keywords: prompting, applications
Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment, Publicly available software and/or pre-trained models, Data resources, Data analysis
Languages Studied: English
Submission Number: 1133
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