{"paper":{"title":"Sampling Luck Masquerades as Allocation Gain: Auditing Test-Time Budget Allocation for Neural Combinatorial Optimization","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI","math.OC"],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Jinhyung Bae","submitted_at":"2026-08-13T10:53:48Z","abstract_excerpt":"Neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) solvers report the best of many sampled solutions per instance, and the sample count is, by convention, identical for every instance. Whether a non-uniform allocation of a fixed total budget would buy anything has not been measured. We measure it, and we audit the measurement itself.\n  First, on in-distribution workloads the allocation headroom is not detectable. Across three pretrained solvers (POMO, AM, SymNCO) on uniform TSP-100, an oracle allocation computed and evaluated on the same stored samples reports a 2.2-2.6% gain with intervals excluding zer"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2608.13087","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/2608.13087/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"}