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Chiming Duan

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Published work

5 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Agentic Memory Enhanced Recursive Reasoning for Root Cause Localization in Microservices

As contemporary microservice systems become increasingly popular and complex-often comprising hundreds or even thousands of fine-grained, interdependent subsystems-they are experiencing more frequent failures. Ensuring system reliability thus demands accurate root cause localization. While many traditional graph-based and deep learning approaches have been explored for this task, they often rely heavily on pre-defined schemas that struggle to adapt to evolving operational contexts. Consequently, a number of LLM-based methods have recently been proposed. However, these methods still face two major limitations: shallow, symptom-centric reasoning that undermines accuracy, and a lack of cross-alert reuse that leads to redundant reasoning and high latency. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study of how Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) localize the root causes of failures, drawing insights from professionals across multiple organizations. Our investigation reveals that expert root cause analysis exhibits three key characteristics: recursiveness, multi-dimensional expansion, and cross-modal reasoning. Motivated by these findings, we introduce AMER-RCL, an agentic memory enhanced recursive reasoning framework for root cause localization in microservices. AMER-RCL employs the Recursive Reasoning RCL engine, a multi-agent framework that performs recursive reasoning on each alert to progressively refine candidate causes, while Agentic Memory incrementally accumulates and reuses reasoning from prior alerts within a time window to reduce redundant exploration and lower inference latency. Experimental results demonstrate that AMER-RCL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both localization accuracy and inference efficiency.

preprint2026arXiv

From Feedback Loops to Policy Updates: Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for LLM-Based Alpha Factor Discovery

Modern quantitative trading increasingly relies on systematic models to extract predictive signals from large-scale financial data, where alpha factor discovery plays a central role in transforming market observations into tradable signals. Recent LLM-based methods have shown promise in automating factor generation, but most of them still rely on prompt-level generation--evaluation--feedback loops for iterative optimization. As the loop becomes longer, repeatedly appended historical candidates and feedback can cause context explosion, increase inference cost, dilute useful information, and introduce feedback drift. Moreover, these methods often depend on very large LLMs whose stable generation preferences may lead to structurally similar expressions, redundant candidates, and search stagnation. To address these limitations, we propose \textsc{QuantEvolver}, a self-evolving alpha factor discovery framework based on reinforcement fine-tuning. Instead of accumulating feedback in the prompt, \textsc{QuantEvolver} converts executable quantitative evaluation into policy updates, enabling a Miner LLM to internalize historical optimization experience through parameter learning. Specifically, \textsc{QuantEvolver} constructs high-quality seed factors, builds diverse seed--time-window training tasks, generates executable Factor DSL expressions, evaluates them through Regime Backtest, and optimizes the Miner LLM with Diversity-Complementarity Reward. During training, high-quality factors are continuously accumulated in a Mined Factor Database, which serves as the final discovered factor library. Extensive experiments on three realistic market benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of \textsc{QuantEvolver}, which consistently improves the primary evaluation metric of each task over existing LLM-based alpha factor discovery baselines, produces higher-quality and more complementary factor pools.

preprint2026arXiv

Hypothesize-Then-Verify: Speculative Root Cause Analysis for Microservices with Pathwise Parallelism

Microservice systems have become the backbone of cloud-native enterprise applications due to their resource elasticity, loosely coupled architecture, and lightweight deployment. Yet, the intrinsic complexity and dynamic runtime interactions of such systems inevitably give rise to anomalies. Ensuring system reliability therefore hinges on effective root cause analysis (RCA), which entails not only localizing the source of anomalies but also characterizing the underlying failures in a timely and interpretable manner. Recent advances in intelligent RCA techniques, particularly those powered by large language models (LLMs), have demonstrated promising capabilities, as LLMs reduce reliance on handcrafted features while offering cross-platform adaptability, task generalization, and flexibility. However, existing LLM-based methods still suffer from two critical limitations: (a) limited exploration diversity, which undermines accuracy, and (b) heavy dependence on large-scale LLMs, which results in slow inference. To overcome these challenges, we propose SpecRCA, a speculative root cause analysis framework for microservices that adopts a \textit{hypothesize-then-verify} paradigm. SpecRCA first leverages a hypothesis drafting module to rapidly generate candidate root causes, and then employs a parallel root cause verifier to efficiently validate them. Preliminary experiments on the AIOps 2022 dataset demonstrate that SpecRCA achieves superior accuracy and efficiency compared to existing approaches, highlighting its potential as a practical solution for scalable and interpretable RCA in complex microservice environments.

preprint2026arXiv

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.

preprint2026arXiv

Towards In-Depth Root Cause Localization for Microservices with Multi-Agent Recursion-of-Thought

As modern microservice systems grow increasingly complex due to dynamic interactions and evolving runtime environments, they experience failures with rising frequency. Ensuring system reliability therefore critically depends on accurate root cause localization (RCL). While numerous traditional machine learning and deep learning approaches have been explored for this task, they often suffer from limited interpretability and poor transferability across deployments. More recently, large language model (LLM)-based methods have been proposed to address these issues. However, existing LLM-based approaches still face two fundamental limitations: context explosion, which dilutes critical evidence and degrades localization accuracy, and serial reasoning structures, which hinder deep causal exploration and impair inference efficiency. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study of both how human SREs perform root cause localization in practice and why existing LLM-based methods fall short. Motivated by these findings, we introduce RCLAgent, an in-depth root cause localization framework for microservice systems that realizes multi-agent recursion-of-thought with parallel reasoning. RCLAgent decomposes the diagnostic process along the trace graph by assigning each span to a Dedicated Agent and organizing agents recursively and in parallel according to the graph topology, with the final diagnosis obtained by synthesizing the Root-Level Diagnosis Report and the Global Evidence Graph. Extensive experiments on multiple public benchmarks demonstrate that RCLAgent consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both localization accuracy and inference efficiency.