PhD Seminar • Systems and Networking • Active Learning for Fault Diagnosis in 5G and Beyond Mobile Networks

Please note: This PhD seminar will take place in DC 1304.

Soheil Johari, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Supervisor: Professor Raouf Boutaba

As 5G and beyond mobile networks evolve, their increasing complexity necessitates advanced, automated, and data-driven fault diagnosis methods. While traditional data-driven methods falter with modern network complexities, Transformer models have proven highly effective for fault diagnosis through their efficient processing of sequential and time-series data. However, these Transformer-based methods demand substantial labeled data, which is costly to obtain.

To address the lack of labeled data, we propose a novel active learning (AL) approach designed for Transformer-based fault diagnosis, tailored to the time-series nature of network data. AL reduces the need for extensive labeled datasets by iteratively selecting the most informative samples for labeling. Our AL method exploits the interpretability of Transformers, using their attention weights to create dependency graphs that represent processing patterns of data points. By formulating a one-class novelty detection problem on these graphs, we identify whether an unlabeled sample is processed differently from labeled ones in the previous training cycle and designate novel samples for expert annotation. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that our AL method achieves higher F1-scores than state-of-the-art AL algorithms with 50% fewer labeled samples and surpasses existing methods by up to 150% in identifying samples related to unseen fault types.