Hypergraph and Latent ODE Learning for Multimodal Root Cause Localization in Microservices

arXiv cs.AI / 5/4/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper proposes HyperODE RCA, a unified framework for fine-grained root cause localization in microservices that models complex dependencies, irregular time dynamics, and heterogeneous observability signals.
  • It learns higher-order service interactions via hypergraph attention with differentiable hyperedge construction, enabling more expressive dependency modeling than simple pairwise graphs.
  • To handle continuous anomaly evolution under irregular observations, it uses a latent ordinary differential equation (ODE) approach with an ODE-RNN encoder.
  • For multimodal inputs, it adaptively fuses logs, traces, metrics, entities, and events using context-aware cross-attention and modality routing.
  • Experiments on the Tianchi AIOps benchmark report improved ranking and classification versus strong baselines, while maintaining interpretability through learned hypergraph attention and additional robustness techniques (e.g., variational information bottleneck and causal/IR constraints).

Abstract

Root cause localization in cloud native microservice systems requires modeling complex service dependencies, irregular temporal dynamics, and heterogeneous observability data. We present HyperODE RCA, a unified framework that combines hypergraph attention learning, latent ordinary differential equations, and multimodal cross attention fusion for fine grained root cause analysis. The method learns higher order service interactions through differentiable hyperedge construction, captures continuous anomaly evolution from irregular observations with an ODE RNN encoder, and adaptively fuses logs, traces, metrics, entities, and events using context aware modality routing. We further improve robustness with a variational information bottleneck, temporal causal regularization, and invariant risk constraints. Experiments on the Tianchi AIOps benchmark show clear gains over strong baselines in ranking and classification performance, while preserving interpretability through learned hypergraph attention.