Modern configurable systems provide tremendous opportunities for engineering future intelligent software systems. A key difficulty thereof is how to effectively self-adapt the configuration of a running system such that its performance (e.g., runtime and throughput) can be optimized under time-varying workloads. This unfortunately remains unaddressed in existing approaches as they either overlook the available past knowledge or rely on static exploitation of past knowledge without reasoning the usefulness of information when planning for self-adaptation. In this paper, we tackle this challenging problem by proposing DLiSA, a framework that self-adapts configurable systems. DLiSA comes with two properties: firstly, it supports lifelong planning, and thereby the planning process runs continuously throughout the lifetime of the system, allowing dynamic exploitation of the accumulated knowledge for rapid adaptation. Secondly, the planning for a newly emerged workload is boosted via distilled knowledge seeding, in which the knowledge is dynamically purified such that only useful past configurations are seeded when necessary, mitigating misleading information. Extensive experiments suggest that the proposed DLiSA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, demonstrating a performance improvement of up to 229 % and a resource acceleration of up to$2.22 \times$on generating promising adaptation configurations. All data and sources can be found at our repository: https://github.com/ideas-labo/dlisa.

@inproceedings{paperbot8814,
  title = {Distilled Lifelong Self-Adaptation for Configurable Systems},
  author = {Yulong Ye and Tao Chen and Miqing Li},
  booktitle = {ICSE},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1109/icse55347.2025.00094}
}