Dances with Drifts: Efficient and Effective In-Context Adaptation to Concept Drift for Structured Data

This repository contains the code for the paper In-Context Adaptation to Concept Drift for Learned Database Operations (ICML 2025).

FLAIR Overview

We propose a novel online adaptation framework called FLAIR, which can produce predictions adaptively under different concepts without retraining. Different from the existing approaches, FLAIR presents a new online in-context adaptation paradigm that not only addresses the concept drift challenge inherent in AI-powered databases but also supports various downstream tasks. The key intuition behind FLAIR draws from the in-context learning paradigm of large language models (LLMs), seamlessly integrating `contextual cues' from database environments to dynamically generate outputs that are acutely attuned to the current context.

As illustrated in the figure, FLAIR realizes in-context adaptation based on two cascaded modules. First, the **task featurization module (TFM)** is a customizable component that extracts informative and task-specific features for subsequent processing. Second, the **dynamic decision engine (DDE)** leverages the extracted features to deliver contextualized predictions given contextual information about the current concept.

Implementation

Environment

Clone the repository locally, and then create a virtual environment:

- conda create --name FLAIR python=3.8+
- conda activate FLAIR

Install the required packages:

- cd FLAIR
- pip install -r requirements.txt
- python src/init/initialize.py

Install PostgreSQL (in Linux):

- cd FLAIR
- wget https://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/source/v13.1/postgresql-13.1.tar.bz2
- tar xvf postgresql-13.1.tar.bz2 && cd postgresql-13.1
- patch -s -p1 < ../pg_modify.patch
- ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/pgsql/13.1 --enable-depend --enable-cassert --enable-debug CFLAGS="-ggdb -O0"
- make -j 64 && sudo make install
- echo 'export PATH=/usr/local/pgsql/13.1/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc
- echo 'export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/pgsql/13.1/lib/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH' >> ~/.bashrc
- source ~/.bashrc

We follow the PostgreSQL setup as ALECE.

Data and workload preparation

• Download the dataset and move it into ./data/STATS/data/, which can be found in Benchmark.
• Download the workload and move it into ./data/STATS/workload/dist_shift_mild/ and ./data/STATS/workload/dist_shift_severe/, which can be found in Benchmark.

Offline Training

FLAIR is trained in two stages. In the first stage, the DDE module $\mathcal{M}_{DDE}$ undergoes a one-off meta-training phase across various task distributions.

We have released the checkpoint file for our DDE module, please move it into ./src/MetaDDE/models_diff/. You can also train your own DDE from desired prior task distributions.

In the second stage, the $\mathcal{M}_{TFM}$ module is trained to extract informative task features that are critical for the specific tasks at hand. Run the following scripts for two dynamic scenarios:

- python main.py --model FLAIR --data STATS --batch_size 512 --wl_type dist_shift_mild --tfm_train 1 --n_epochs 20 --gpu 1
- python main.py --model FLAIR --data STATS --batch_size 512 --wl_type dist_shift_severe --tfm_train 1 --n_epochs 20 --gpu 1

Command line options:

• model: name of the model, one of ["FLAIR", "pg"] or customer model name, default="FLAIR".
• data: name of the dataset, default="STATS".
• batch_size: batch size for training the TFM, default=1024.
• drift_type: type of concept drift, one of ["dist_shift_mild", "dist_shift_severe"], default="dist_shift_mild".
• tfm_train: 1 for TFM training, else 0, default=0.
• n_epochs: number of epochs, default=20.
• adapt_reg: enable in-context adaptation for the model, default=False.
• stack_size: queue size of the context memory, default=80.
• gpu: the gpu device index, default=0.

Online Inference and Adaptation

Once trained, FLAIR is ready for deployment in a real-time environment, performing concurrent online inference and adaptation under evolving concepts. Run the following scripts for inference:

- python main.py --model FLAIR --data STATS --wl_type dist_shift_mild --adapt_reg True --stack_size 80 --gpu 1
- python main.py --model FLAIR --data STATS --wl_type dist_shift_severe --adapt_reg True --stack_size 80 --gpu 1

Acknowledgments

This project is based on the following open-source projects:ALECE, TabPFN. We thank their authors for making the source code publicly available.

Citation

If you find this paper and repository useful, you are welcome to star ⭐ this repository and cite 📝 our work:

@inproceedings{zhu2025context,
  title={In-Context Adaptation to Concept Drift for Learned Database Operations},
  author={Zhu, Jiaqi and Cai, Shaofeng and Shen, Yanyan and Chen, Gang and Deng, Fang and Ooi, Beng Chin},
  booktitle={Forty-second International Conference on Machine Learning},
  year={2025}
}