Summary
Add temporal decay to MAB-UCB so it forgets stale relay performance data. Currently all rounds are weighted equally.
Why
Relay quality changes over time — a relay that was great 6 months ago may be dead now. The current MAB-UCB implementation weights all 500 simulated rounds equally, which works in a static benchmark but would mislead a real client. Using only the last N observations (or exponential decay) would make the algorithm responsive to relay health changes.
What to do
- Implement a sliding window variant: only use the last N observations per relay when computing UCB scores
- Alternatively, implement exponential decay: weight recent observations more heavily
- Benchmark both variants against vanilla MAB-UCB across all 6 time windows
Effort
Medium — requires modifying the MAB state management and benchmarking multiple decay parameters.
Reference
- IMPLEMENTATION-GUIDE.md: Improvement Opportunities (medium effort)
Summary
Add temporal decay to MAB-UCB so it forgets stale relay performance data. Currently all rounds are weighted equally.
Why
Relay quality changes over time — a relay that was great 6 months ago may be dead now. The current MAB-UCB implementation weights all 500 simulated rounds equally, which works in a static benchmark but would mislead a real client. Using only the last N observations (or exponential decay) would make the algorithm responsive to relay health changes.
What to do
Effort
Medium — requires modifying the MAB state management and benchmarking multiple decay parameters.
Reference