{"paper":{"title":"From Theory to Practice with RAVEN-UCB: Addressing Non-Stationarity in Multi-Armed Bandits through Variance Adaptation","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["stat.ML"],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Chen Zhang, Junyi Fang, Yuxin Chen, Yuxun Chen","submitted_at":"2025-06-03T14:35:04Z","abstract_excerpt":"The Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem is challenging in non-stationary environments where reward distributions evolve dynamically. We introduce RAVEN-UCB, a novel algorithm that combines theoretical rigor with practical efficiency via variance-aware adaptation. It achieves tighter regret bounds than UCB1 and UCB-V, with gap-dependent regret of order $K \\sigma_{\\max}^2 \\log T / \\Delta$ and gap-independent regret of order $\\sqrt{K T \\log T}$. RAVEN-UCB incorporates three innovations: (1) variance-driven exploration using $\\sqrt{\\hat{\\sigma}_k^2 / (N_k + 1)}$ in confidence bounds, (2) adaptive con"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2506.02933","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2506.02933/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}