LLM-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Time Series Anomaly Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Golchin, Bahareh, Rekabdar, Banafsheh, Justo, Danielle
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Golchin, Bahareh
Rekabdar, Banafsheh
Justo, Danielle
author_facet Golchin, Bahareh
Rekabdar, Banafsheh
Justo, Danielle
contents Detecting anomalies in time series data is crucial for finance, healthcare, sensor networks, and industrial monitoring applications. However, time series anomaly detection often suffers from sparse labels, complex temporal patterns, and costly expert annotation. We propose a unified framework that integrates Large Language Model (LLM)-based potential functions for reward shaping with Reinforcement Learning (RL), Variational Autoencoder (VAE)-enhanced dynamic reward scaling, and active learning with label propagation. An LSTM-based RL agent leverages LLM-derived semantic rewards to guide exploration, while VAE reconstruction errors add unsupervised anomaly signals. Active learning selects the most uncertain samples, and label propagation efficiently expands labeled data. Evaluations on Yahoo-A1 and SMD benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy under limited labeling budgets and operates effectively in data-constrained settings. This study highlights the promise of combining LLMs with RL and advanced unsupervised techniques for robust, scalable anomaly detection in real-world applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_02511
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLM-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Time Series Anomaly Detection
Golchin, Bahareh
Rekabdar, Banafsheh
Justo, Danielle
Machine Learning
Detecting anomalies in time series data is crucial for finance, healthcare, sensor networks, and industrial monitoring applications. However, time series anomaly detection often suffers from sparse labels, complex temporal patterns, and costly expert annotation. We propose a unified framework that integrates Large Language Model (LLM)-based potential functions for reward shaping with Reinforcement Learning (RL), Variational Autoencoder (VAE)-enhanced dynamic reward scaling, and active learning with label propagation. An LSTM-based RL agent leverages LLM-derived semantic rewards to guide exploration, while VAE reconstruction errors add unsupervised anomaly signals. Active learning selects the most uncertain samples, and label propagation efficiently expands labeled data. Evaluations on Yahoo-A1 and SMD benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy under limited labeling budgets and operates effectively in data-constrained settings. This study highlights the promise of combining LLMs with RL and advanced unsupervised techniques for robust, scalable anomaly detection in real-world applications.
title LLM-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Time Series Anomaly Detection
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02511