Predicting Intermittent Job Failure Categories for Diagnosis Using Few-Shot Fine-Tuned Language Models

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Main Authors: Aïdasso, Henri, Bordeleau, Francis, Tizghadam, Ali
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Aïdasso, Henri
Bordeleau, Francis
Tizghadam, Ali
author_facet Aïdasso, Henri
Bordeleau, Francis
Tizghadam, Ali
contents In principle, Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline failures provide valuable feedback to developers on code-related errors. In practice, however, pipeline jobs often fail intermittently due to non-deterministic tests, network outages, infrastructure failures, resource exhaustion, and other reliability issues. These intermittent (flaky) job failures lead to substantial inefficiencies: wasted computational resources from repeated reruns and significant diagnosis time that distracts developers from core activities and often requires intervention from specialized teams. Prior work has proposed machine learning techniques to detect intermittent failures, but does not address the subsequent diagnosis challenge. To fill this gap, we introduce FlaXifyer, a few-shot learning approach for predicting intermittent job failure categories using pre-trained language models. FlaXifyer requires only job execution logs and achieves 84.3% Macro F1 and 92.0% Top-2 accuracy with just 12 labeled examples per category. We also propose LogSift, an interpretability technique that identifies influential log statements in under one second, reducing review effort by 74.4% while surfacing relevant failure information in 87% of cases. Evaluation on 2,458 job failures from TELUS demonstrates that FlaXifyer and LogSift enable effective automated triage, accelerate failure diagnosis, and pave the way towards the automated resolution of intermittent job failures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_22264
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Predicting Intermittent Job Failure Categories for Diagnosis Using Few-Shot Fine-Tuned Language Models
Aïdasso, Henri
Bordeleau, Francis
Tizghadam, Ali
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
In principle, Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline failures provide valuable feedback to developers on code-related errors. In practice, however, pipeline jobs often fail intermittently due to non-deterministic tests, network outages, infrastructure failures, resource exhaustion, and other reliability issues. These intermittent (flaky) job failures lead to substantial inefficiencies: wasted computational resources from repeated reruns and significant diagnosis time that distracts developers from core activities and often requires intervention from specialized teams. Prior work has proposed machine learning techniques to detect intermittent failures, but does not address the subsequent diagnosis challenge. To fill this gap, we introduce FlaXifyer, a few-shot learning approach for predicting intermittent job failure categories using pre-trained language models. FlaXifyer requires only job execution logs and achieves 84.3% Macro F1 and 92.0% Top-2 accuracy with just 12 labeled examples per category. We also propose LogSift, an interpretability technique that identifies influential log statements in under one second, reducing review effort by 74.4% while surfacing relevant failure information in 87% of cases. Evaluation on 2,458 job failures from TELUS demonstrates that FlaXifyer and LogSift enable effective automated triage, accelerate failure diagnosis, and pave the way towards the automated resolution of intermittent job failures.
title Predicting Intermittent Job Failure Categories for Diagnosis Using Few-Shot Fine-Tuned Language Models
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22264