Modern configurable software systems need to learn models that correlate configuration and performance. However, when the system operates in dynamic environments, the workload variations, hardware changes, and system updates will inevitably introduce concept drifts at different levels—global drifts, which reshape the performance landscape of the entire configuration space; and local drifts, which only affect certain sub-regions of that space. As such, existing offline and transfer learning approaches can struggle to adapt to these implicit and unpredictable changes in real-time, rendering configuration performance learning challenging. To address this, we propose DHDA, an online configuration performance learning framework designed to capture and adapt to these drifts at different levels. The key idea is that DHDA adapts to both the local and global drifts using dually hierarchical adaptation: at the upper level, we redivide the data into different divisions, within each of which the local model is retrained, to handle global drifts only when necessary. At the lower level, the local models of the divisions can detect local drifts and adapt themselves asynchronously. To balance responsiveness and efficiency, DHDA combines incremental updates with periodic full retraining to minimize redundant computation when no drifts are detected. Through evaluating eight software systems and against state-of-the-art approaches, we show that DHDA achieves considerably better accuracy and can effectively adapt to drifts with up to 2 × improvements, while incurring reasonable overhead and is able to improve different local models in handling concept drift.

@inproceedings{abs-2507-08730,
  title = {Dually Hierarchical Drift Adaptation for Online Configuration Performance Learning},
  author = {Zezhen Xiang and Jingzhi Gong and Tao Chen},
  booktitle = {ICSE},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.1145/3744916.3764542}
}