Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, enabling unprecedented capabilities in reasoning, planning, and tool utilization. Enterprises are increasingly adopting LLM-powered agents to automate complex workflows, from meeting summarization (e.g., Microsoft Copilot) to supply chain optimization and customer service orchestration. However, deploying agentic AI systems in enterprise settings introduces unique challenges, including decision making under uncertainty, multi-agent collaboration, security vulnerabilities, and trust gaps in mission-critical applications. This workshop aims to bridge the gap between academia and industry to explore LLM-driven agentic systems tailored for enterprise needs. We focus on three pillars: 1) emerging architectures that enable dynamic task decomposition and tool invocation; 2) domain-specific applications such as case studies in supply chain and employee productivity domain; 3) evaluation and governance such as the AAEF (Agentic Application Evaluation Framework) and security strategies.

This workshop introduces generative AI applications for enterprise, with a focus on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. Generative AI is a field of artificial intelligence that can create new content and solve complex problems. RAG systems are a novel generative AI technique that combines information retrieval with text generation to generate rich and diverse responses. RAG systems can leverage enterprise data, which is often specific, structured, and dynamic, to provide customized solutions for various domains. However, enterprise data also poses challenges such as scalability, security, and data quality. This workshop convenes researchers and practitioners to explore RAG and other generative AI systems in real-world enterprise scenarios, fostering knowledge exchange, collaboration, and identification of future directions. Relevant to the CIKM community, the workshop intersects with core areas of data science and machine learning, offering potential benefits across various domains.

In network link prediction, it is possible to hide a target link from being predicted with a small perturbation on network structure. This observation may be exploited in many real world scenarios, for example, to preserve privacy, or to exploit financial security. There have been many recent studies to generate adversarial examples to mislead deep learning models on graph data. However, none of the previous work has considered the dynamic nature of real-world systems. In this work, we present the first study of adversarial attack on dynamic network link prediction (DNLP). The proposed attack method, namely time-aware gradient attack (TGA), utilizes the gradient information generated by deep dynamic network embedding (DDNE) across different snapshots to rewire a few links, so as to make DDNE fail to predict target links. We implement TGA in two ways: one is based on traversal search, namely TGA-Tra; and the other is simplified with greedy search for efficiency, namely TGA-Gre. We conduct comprehensive experiments which show the outstanding performance of TGA in attacking DNLP algorithms.

Community detection, which focuses on clustering vertex interactions, plays a significant role in network analysis. However, it also faces numerous challenges like missing data and adversarial attack. How to further improve the performance and robustness of community detection for real-world networks has raised great concerns. In this paper, we explore robust community detection by enhancing network structure, with two generic algorithms presented: one is named robust community detection via genetic algorithm (RobustECDGA), in which the modularity and the number of clusters are combined in a fitness function to find the optimal structure enhancement scheme; the other is called robust community detection via similarity ensemble (RobustECD-SE), integrating multiple information of community structures captured by various vertex similarities, which scales well on large-scale networks. Comprehensive experiments on real-world networks demonstrate, by comparing with two traditional enhancement strategies, that the new methods help six representative community detection algorithms achieve more significant performance improvement. Moreover, experiments on the corresponding adversarial networks indicate that the new methods could also optimize the network structure to a certain extent, achieving stronger robustness against adversarial attack. The source code of this paper is released on https://github.com/jjzhou012/robustECD release.

Performance troubleshooting is notoriously difficult for distributed microservices-based applications. A typical root-cause diagnosis for performance anomaly by an analyst starts by narrowing down the scope of slow services, investigates into high-level performance metrics or available logs in the slow components, and finally drills down to an actual cause. This process can be long, tedious, and sometimes aimless due to the lack of domain knowledge and the sheer number of possible culprits. This paper introduces a new machine-learning-driven performance analysis system called LongTale that automates the troubleshooting process for latency-related performance anomalies to facilitate the root cause diagnosis and explanation. LongTale builds on existing application-layer tracing in two significant aspects. First, it stitches application-layer traces with corresponding system stack traces, which enables more informative root-cause analysis. Second, it utilizes a novel machine-learning-driven analysis that feeds on the combined data to automatically uncover the most likely contributing factor(s) for given performance slowdown. We demonstrate how LongTale can be utilized in different scenarios, including abnormal long-tail latency explanation and performance interference analysis.

Malware detection is an essential step in building trustworthy computer systems. Signature-based detection detects a sample as malware if the sample data match or contain a pre-stored malware signature. Among all detection methods that malware experts are constantly exploring, signature-based malware detection is indispensable, due to its simplicity, explainability and efficiency. Malware signatures could have various formats, for example, a substring, a subsequence, or a combination rule. A combination rule signature could be viewed as a fixed set of properties, each of which describes some characteristic of an analyzed sample. Although security experts have dedicated many efforts to extract meaningful features from samples, the step of signature generation from the features has been rather ad hoc and time-consuming.

A trojan backdoor is a hidden pattern typically implanted in a deep neural network (DNN). It could be activated and thus forces that infected model to behave abnormally when an input sample with a particular trigger is fed to that model. As such, given a DNN and clean input samples, it is challenging to inspect and determine the existence of a trojan backdoor. Recently, researchers design and develop several pioneering solutions to address this problem. They demonstrate that the proposed techniques have great potential in trojan detection. However, we show that none of these existing techniques completely address the problem. On the one hand, they mostly work under an unrealistic assumption of assuming the availability of the contaminated training database. On the other hand, these techniques can neither accurately detect the existence of trojan backdoors, nor restore high-fidelity triggers, especially when infected models are trained with high-dimensional data, and the triggers pertaining to the trojan vary in size, shape, and position. In this work, we propose TABOR, a new trojan detection technique. Conceptually, it formalizes the detection of a trojan backdoor as solving an optimization objective function. Different from the existing technique which also models trojan detection as an optimization problem, TABOR first designs a new objective function that could guide optimization to identify a trojan backdoor more correctly and accurately. Second, TABOR borrows the idea of interpretable AI to further prune the restored triggers. Last, TABOR designs a new anomaly detection method, which could not only facilitate the identification of intentionally injected triggers but also filter out false alarms (i.e., triggers detected from an uninfected model). We train 112 DNNs on five datasets and infect these models with two existing trojan attacks. We evaluate TABOR by using these infected models, and demonstrate that TABOR has much better performance in trigger restoration, trojan detection, and elimination than Neural Cleanse, the state-of-the-art trojan detection technique.

Nowadays an emerging class of applications are based oncollaboration over a shared database among different entities. However, the existing solutions on shared database may require trust on others, have high hardware demand that is unaffordable for individual users, or have relatively low performance. In other words, there is a trilemma among security, compatibility and efficiency. In this paper, we present FalconDB, which enables different parties with limited hardware resources to efficiently and securely collaborate on a database. FalconDB adopts database servers with verification interfaces accessible to clients and stores the digests for query/update authentications on a blockchain. Using blockchain as a consensus platform and a distributed ledger, FalconDB is able to work without any trust on each other. Meanwhile, FalconDB requires only minimal storage cost on each client, and provides anywhere-available, real-time and concurrent access to the database. As a result, FalconDB over-comes the disadvantages of previous solutions, and enables individual users to participate in the collaboration with high efficiency, low storage cost and blockchain-level security guarantees.

Anomaly detection is essential towards ensuring system security and reliability. Powered by constantly generated system data, deep learning has been found both effective and flexible to use, with its ability to extract patterns without much domain knowledge. Existing anomaly detection research focuses on a scenario referred to as zero-positive, which means that the detection model is only trained for normal (i.e., negative) data. In a real application scenario, there may be additional manually inspected positive data provided after the system is deployed. We refer to this scenario as lifelong anomaly detection. However, we find that existing approaches are not easy to adopt such new knowledge to improve system performance. In this work, we are the first to explore the lifelong anomaly detection problem, and propose novel approaches to handle corresponding challenges. In particular, we propose a framework called unlearning, which can effectively correct the model when a false negative (or a false positive) is labeled. To this aim, we develop several novel techniques to tackle two challenges referred to as exploding loss and catastrophic forgetting. In addition, we abstract a theoretical framework based on generative models. Under this framework, our unlearning approach can be presented in a generic way to be applied to most zero-positive deep learning-based anomaly detection algorithms to turn them into corresponding lifelong anomaly detection solutions. We evaluate our approach using two state-of-the-art zero-positive deep learning anomaly detection architectures and three real-world tasks. The results show that the proposed approach is able to significantly reduce the number of false positives and false negatives through unlearning.

Personalized Point of Interest (POI) recommendation that incorporates users' personal preferences is an important subject of research. However, challenges exist such as dealing with sparse rating data and spatial location factors. As one of the biggest card payment organizations in the United States, our company holds abundant card payment transaction records with numerous features.

System event logs have been frequently used as a valuable resource in data-driven approaches to enhance system health and stability. A typical procedure in system log analytics is to first parse unstructured logs to structured data, and then apply data mining and machine learning techniques and/or build workflow models from the resulting structured data. Previous work on parsing system event logs focused on offline, batch processing of raw log files. But increasingly, applications demand online monitoring and processing. As a result, a streaming method to parse unstructured logs is needed. We propose an online streaming method Spell, which utilizes a longest common subsequence based approach, to parse system event logs. We show how to dynamically extract log patterns from incoming logs and how to maintain a set of discovered message types in streaming fashion. An enhancement to find more accurate message types is also proposed. We also propose and evaluate a method to automatically discover semantic meanings for parameter fields identified by Spell. We compare Spell against state-of-the-art methods to extract patterns from system event logs on large real data. The results demonstrate that, compared with other log parsing alternatives, Spell shows its superiority in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness.

Anomaly detection is a critical step towards building a secure and trustworthy system. The primary purpose of a system log is to record system states and significant events at various critical points to help debug system failures and perform root cause analysis. Such log data is universally available in nearly all computer systems. Log data is an important and valuable resource for understanding system status and performance issues; therefore, the various system logs are naturally excellent source of information for online monitoring and anomaly detection. We propose DeepLog, a deep neural network model utilizing Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), to model a system log as a natural language sequence. This allows DeepLog to automatically learn log patterns from normal execution, and detect anomalies when log patterns deviate from the model trained from log data under normal execution. In addition, we demonstrate how to incrementally update the DeepLog model in an online fashion so that it can adapt to new log patterns over time. Furthermore, DeepLog constructs workflows from the underlying system log so that once an anomaly is detected, users can diagnose the detected anomaly and perform root cause analysis effectively. Extensive experimental evaluations over large log data have shown that DeepLog has outperformed other existing log-based anomaly detection methods based on traditional data mining methodologies.

Metering is an important component of cloud database services. We discuss potential problems in verifiability for existing DBaaS metering and initiate a discussion of how we can address this problem.

The emergence of Infrastructure as a Service framework brings new opportunities, which also accompanies with new challenges in auto scaling, resource allocation, and security. A fundamental challenge underpinning these problems is the continuous tracking and monitoring of resource usage in the system. In this paper, we present ATOM, an efficient and effective framework to automatically track, monitor, and orchestrate resource usage in an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) system that is widely used in cloud infrastructure. We use novel tracking method to continuously track important system usage metrics with low overhead, and develop a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based approach to continuously monitor and automatically find anomalies based on the approximated tracking results. We show how to dynamically set the tracking threshold based on the detection results, and further, how to adjust tracking algorithm to ensure its optimality under dynamic workloads. Lastly, when potential anomalies are identified, we use introspection tools to perform memory forensics on VMs guided by analyzed results from tracking and monitoring to identify malicious behavior inside a VM. We demonstrate the extensibility of ATOM through virtual machine (VM) clustering. The performance of our framework is evaluated in an open source IaaS system.

System event logs have been frequently used as a valuable resource in data-driven approaches to enhance system health and stability. A typical procedure in system log analytics is to first parse unstructured logs, and then apply data analysis on the resulting structured data. Previous work on parsing system event logs focused on offline, batch processing of raw log files. But increasingly, applications demand online monitoring and processing. We propose an online streaming method Spell, which utilizes a longest common subsequence based approach, to parse system event logs. We show how to dynamically extract log patterns from incoming logs and how to maintain a set of discovered message types in streaming fashion. Evaluation results on large real system logs demonstrate that even compared with the offline alternatives, Spell shows its superiority in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness.

We present ATOM, an efficient and effective framework to enable automated tracking, monitoring, and orchestration of resource usage in an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) system. We design a novel tracking method to continuously track important performance metrics with low overhead, and develop a principal component analysis (PCA) based approach with quality guarantees to continuously monitor and automatically find anomalies based on the approximate tracking results. Lastly, when potential anomalies are identified, we use introspection tools to perform memory forensics on virtual machines (VMs) to identify malicious behavior inside a VM. We deploy ATOM in an IaaS system to monitor VM resource usage, and to detect anomalies. Various attacks are used as examples to demonstrate how ATOM is both effective and efficient to track and monitor resource usage, detect anomalies, and orchestrate system resource usage.