AD-LLM: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Anomaly Detection

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.

NLP-ADBench: NLP Anomaly Detection Benchmark

Anomaly detection (AD) is a critical machine learning task with diverse applications in web systems, including fraud detection, content moderation, and user behavior analysis. Despite its significance, AD in natural language processing (NLP) remains underexplored, limiting advancements in detecting anomalies in text data such as harmful content, phishing attempts, or spam reviews. In this paper, we introduce NLP-ADBench, the most comprehensive benchmark for NLP anomaly detection (NLP-AD), comprising eight curated datasets and evaluations of nineteen state-of-the-art algorithms. These include three end-to-end methods and sixteen two-step algorithms that apply traditional anomaly detection techniques to language embeddings generated by bert-base-uncased and OpenAI's text-embedding-3-large models. Our results reveal critical insights and future directions for NLP-AD. Notably, no single model excels across all datasets, highlighting the need for automated model selection. Moreover, two-step methods leveraging transformer-based embeddings consistently outperform specialized end-to-end approaches, with OpenAI embeddings demonstrating superior performance over BERT embeddings. By releasing NLP-ADBench at https://github.com/USC-FORTIS/NLP-ADBench, we provide a standardized framework for evaluating NLP-AD methods, fostering the development of innovative approaches. This work fills a crucial gap in the field and establishes a foundation for advancing NLP anomaly detection, particularly in the context of improving the safety and reliability of web-based systems.