DAST: A VLM-LLM Framework for Cross-Interface Anomaly Detection in O-RAN

Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) is essential for maintaining the reliability and security of IoT-enabled service systems. Existing methods require training one specific model for each dataset, which exhibits limited generalization capability across different target datasets, hindering anomaly detection performance in various scenarios with scarce training data. To address this limitation, foundation models have emerged as a promising direction. However, existing approaches either repurpose large language models (LLMs) or construct largescale time series datasets to develop general anomaly detection foundation models, and still face challenges caused by severe cross-modal gaps or in-domain heterogeneity. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of large-scale vision models to TSAD. Specifically, we adapt a visual Masked Autoencoder (MAE) pretrained on ImageNet to the TSAD task. However, directly transferring MAE to TSAD introduces two key challenges: overgeneralization and limited local perception. To address these challenges, we propose VAN-AD, a novel MAE-based framework for TSAD. To alleviate the over-generalization issue, we design an Adaptive Distribution Mapping Module (ADMM), which maps the reconstruction results before and after MAE into a unified statistical space to amplify discrepancies caused by abnormal patterns. To overcome the limitation of local perception, we further develop a Normalizing Flow Module (NFM), which combines MAE with normalizing flow to estimate the probability density of the current window under the global distribution. Extensive experiments on nine real-world datasets demonstrate that VAN-AD consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods across multiple evaluation metrics.We make our code and datasets available at https://github.com/PenyChen/VAN-AD.

The Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) architecture allows AI to be embedded directly into the RAN through modular xApps and rApps, yet creating these applications collecting data, training models, writing code, and deploying them safely remains slow and largely manual. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning and code-generation capabilities but are unsuited for the fast, deterministic inference required in real-time RAN control. We present a proof-of-concept Dual-Brain architecture that combines both strengths: an LLM-based orchestrator translates operator intents into data-collection policies and deployment code, while an automated ML engine, NeuralSmith, trains lightweight classifiers on demand via an API. We describe the architecture and provisioning workflow, share practical insights from a containerized O-RAN 5G~SA testbed, and discuss open research directions.

Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN) increasingly delegate near-real-time control to deep reinforcement learning (DRL) xApps obtained from third-party vendors, creating a new supply-chain attack surface. A backdoor policy behaves optimally until an adversary injects a covert trigger into the observed key performance indicator (KPI) telemetry, at which point it issues harmful control actions that degrade quality of service (QoS). We present ORAN-DEFEND, a retraining-free wrapper that sanitizes a frozen, potentially compromised xApp by projecting each KPI window onto a safe subspace estimated from a small number of trusted clean rollouts via singular value decomposition (SVD). We establish, both analytically and empirically, a precise recovery condition: the defense succeeds if the trigger energy concentrates in the orthogonal complement of the safe subspace, and we quantify this boundary through the trigger's $\Eperp$ energy fraction. On the Colosseum COLORAN dataset, we evaluate four structurally distinct DRL backdoor attacks, like TrojDRL, SleeperNets, BadRL, and Q-Incept, spanning inner-loop and outer-loop poisoning regimes and demonstrate $100\%$ return recovery and $\geq99.5\%$ defense success rate across all four when the subspace assumption holds. A geometry ablation reveals an intrinsic and previously uncharacterized limit of any linear projection defense: when the trigger collocates with the legitimate signal, the $\Eperp$ energy fraction governs recovery monotonically, and the linear residual detector collapses to chance even while a nonlinear classifier retains perfect separability.