An Explainable LLM Agent Layer for Open-World Anomaly Detection in Oil Wells

Abstract

Open-World Learning (OWL) pipelines for oil well anomaly detection have recently been shown to combine autoencoder-based detection, multiclass classification, and Mahalanobis-based novelty detection on the public 3W dataset. These pipelines answer \textit{what happened}, but they do not explain \textit{why the model believes it} or \textit{what the operator should do next}, and they do not put a human-readable name on the novelty clusters they discover. This paper evaluates a Large Language Model (LLM) agent layer placed downstream of the OWL pipeline, designed as a \textbf{companion} to the published upstream methods rather than a replacement. Using the Qwen3.5-397B-A17B Mixture-of-Experts model served via NVIDIA NIM, the agent receives structured sensor metrics and upstream classification or novelty assertions, and returns natural-language justifications, confidence-ranked critiques, and consolidated names for detected novelties. Across three studies spanning 989 real well-file segments from the 3W dataset, the agent achieved $35.1\%$ top-1 / $63.9\%$ top-3 (95\% CI [56.9, 70.4]) classification on all nine classes, $71.7\%$ top-2 validation [64.8, 77.6] with precision $0.91$ [0.84, 0.95] across 7 probed classes, and $89.7\%$ novelty detection [87.0, 91.9] with stable cluster naming on 5 of 7 hidden classes. The agent is not a standalone classifier. Its role is to: (1) confirm upstream decisions when sensor evidence supports them, (2) justify decisions in sensor-grounded language operators can audit, (3) flag disagreement when upstream labels are implausible, and (4) name novelties so that clustered unlabeled events arrive at the engineer with a consolidated human-readable label. The goal is to close the explainability gap that currently blocks deployment of OWL pipelines in operational settings.