English

CLAD: Efficient Log Anomaly Detection Directly on Compressed Representations

Machine Learning 2026-04-15 v1 Databases

Abstract

The explosive growth of system logs makes streaming compression essential, yet existing log anomaly detection (LAD) methods incur severe pre-processing overhead by requiring full decompression and parsing. We introduce CLAD, the first deep learning framework to perform LAD directly on compressed byte streams. CLAD bypasses these bottlenecks by exploiting a key insight: normal logs compress into regular byte patterns, while anomalies systematically disrupt them. To extract these multi-scale deviations from opaque bytes, we propose a purpose-built architecture integrating a dilated convolutional byte encoder, a hybrid Transformer--mLSTM, and four-way aggregation pooling. This is coupled with a two-stage training strategy of masked pre-training and focal-contrastive fine-tuning to effectively handle severe class imbalance. Evaluated across five datasets, CLAD achieves a state-of-the-art average F1-score of 0.9909 and outperforms the best baseline by 2.72 percentage points. It delivers superior accuracy while completely eliminating decompression and parsing overheads, offering a robust solution that generalizes to structured streaming compressors.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.13024,
  title  = {CLAD: Efficient Log Anomaly Detection Directly on Compressed Representations},
  author = {Benzhao Tang and Shiyu Yang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.13024},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:09:19.504Z