Evaluation of Large Language Models for Numeric Anomaly Detection in Power Systems

Abstract: LLMs have gained increasing attention in power grids for their general-purpose capabilities. Meanwhile, anomaly detection (AD) remains critical for grid resilience, requiring accurate and interpretable decisions based on multivariate telemetry. Yet the performance of LLMs on large-scale numeric data for AD remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs for numeric AD in power systems. We use GPT-OSS-20B as a representative model and evaluate it on the IEEE 14-bus system. A standardized prompt framework is applied across zero-shot, few-shot, in-context learning, low rank adaptation (LoRA), fine-tuning, and a hybrid LLM-traditional approach. We adopt a rule-aware design based on the three-sigma criterion, and report detection performance and rationale quality. This study lays the groundwork for further investigation into the limitations and capabilities of LLM-based AD and its integration with classical detectors in cyber-physical power grid applications.