Retrain, Alert, or Rollback? A Three-Response Decision Framework for Production ML Under Concept Drift

Abstract

When a deployed model degrades under concept drift, an operator can retrain it, raise an alert and monitor, or roll back. Yet most drift-adaptation methods consider only retraining. We present RAR (Retrain-Alert-Rollback), a state machine that gives each response an explicit trigger and cost. Retraining is gated on drift detection, label availability, and measured degradation. Every retrained model must pass a two-stage canary before promotion, and corruption-triggered and quality-triggered rollbacks enter different hold states. Under a prospectively specified protocol we compare RAR with six baselines, including a cost-aware retraining policy, on 13 streams: eight real public streams and five semi-synthetic streams derived from them. RAR does not dominate. At low retraining cost, retrain-heavy baselines lead, and no policy's rank differs significantly from RAR's. At higher cost, RAR beats detector-triggered retraining, periodic retraining, and no response simultaneously on four streams, each within a bounded cost window. Its advantage over detector-triggered retraining is consistent with a latency-feasibility condition stated in advance. Against the cost-aware policy, results are heterogeneous. RAR retrains before true drift onsets one eighth to one third as often as detector-triggered retraining, but at lower net utility on most semi-synthetic streams. On H2's designated corruption stream (a registered follow-up), rollbacks fire yet RAR loses to retraining baselines. At $ρ= 1$, removing the canary, and thus rollback, raises utility on 11 of 13 streams. On a post-hoc follow-up stream, cause-specific hold release resumes adaptation where a single cooldown does not. We provide the harness, configurations, and per-cell results for reproduction.