Bridging Temporal and Textual Modalities: A Multimodal Framework for Automated Cloud Failure Root Cause Analysis

Abstract

Root cause analysis in modern cloud infrastructure demands sophisticated understanding of heterogeneous data sources, particularly time-series performance metrics that involve core failure signatures. While large language models demonstrate remarkable capabilities in textual reasoning, their discrete token-based architecture creates fundamental incompatibilities with continuous numerical sequences exhibiting temporal dependencies. Current methodologies inadequately address this modality mismatch, constraining the potential of language model-driven automation in incident management workflows. This paper presents a multimodal diagnostic framework that harmonizes time-series representations with pretrained language model embedding spaces. Our approach contributes three technical advances: (1) a semantic compression technique that distills temporal segments into single-token abstractions while preserving pattern semantics, (2) an alignment encoder utilizing gated cross-attention to project time-series features into language model latent space, and (3) a retrieval-augmented diagnostic pipeline that synthesizes aligned embeddings with historical incident knowledge for expert-level failure attribution. Comprehensive evaluation across six cloud system benchmarks demonstrates that our framework achieves leading performance, reaching 48.75% diagnostic accuracy with notable improvements on scenarios involving compound failure modes. The results validate embedding-space alignment as an effective strategy for enabling language models to reason over multimodal telemetry data in production incident response contexts.