The paper investigates when reallocating a fixed test‑time budget toward harder instances improves solution quality for neural combinatorial optimization solvers. Through pre‑registered experiments on three solvers and two hard‑workload constructions for the traveling salesman problem, it finds that the key deciding factor is the variation in instance difficulty within a workload, not the average difficulty. A budget‑aware policy that first spends part of the budget to gauge instance difficulty recovers most of the potential improvement, though not all, when the cost of this information is included.
arXiv:2608.29560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A company with a fixed artificial intelligence (AI) budget must decide which large language model (LLM) handles each recurring workload. What it lacks...
arXiv:2608. 13087v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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.
arXiv:2609.16302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a coding agent returns to existing software, it inherits evidence from earlier engineering work: tests, type checks, proofs, static analyses, an...
arXiv:2609. 29140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Repeated evaluation can estimate a benchmark score accurately while still requiring replication to certify narrow uncertainty.
The paper investigates how test‑time computation can enhance language models and at what cost, introducing the SELF‑POT benchmark to evaluate this across competition mathematics, competitive programming, and agentic workflows. SELF‑POT separates candidate coverage from final accuracy, tracks correctness transitions under revision, and measures protocol completion alongside task success. Using a unified budget rule, the study compares direct inference, parallel sampling, and self‑revision across five low‑cost reasoning models, revealing that selection rules and failure handling significantly influence gains and cost savings.
arXiv:2606. 04402v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern reasoning models can allocate different amounts of test-time computation, such as thinking tokens, model calls, or compute budget, to different tasks.
arXiv:2609.38914v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating interactive agents is expensive. Agent behavior is stochastic, so reliability must be measured over repeated trials, but failures are rare a...
The paper investigates whether large language models’ reasoning traces truly contain early, informative signals or merely reflect budget and difficulty confounds. Using a restart‑controlled truncation probe, the authors compare continuation success rates against from‑scratch restart curves across 178 problem‑model pairs, finding that only one case shows prefix‑limited success and that continuing a model’s own prefix generally outperforms restarting. A difficulty‑controlled test and two generation‑free analyses reveal that early internal signals do not carry outcome information beyond a problem‑difficulty baseline, underscoring the need for proper counterfactual controls.
arXiv:2606. 19808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time reasoning is increasingly used as a serving-time control knob, but extra reasoning is not uniformly valuable: it can repair failed attempts, waste compute on already-correct answers, or introduce harmful answer changes.
Repeated evaluation can estimate a benchmark score accurately while still requiring replication to certify narrow uncertainty. We characterize that requirement on a fixed grid of $M$ tasks with $L$ binary paths per task under the hard budget $(M+t)K$, where each path costs at most $K$ responses or episodes.
The paper proposes a claim‑specific verification audit for modular agents that replaces aggregate task scores with evidence‑based evaluations. Each agent conclusion is recorded with supporting evidence and classified as supported, unsupported, unresolved, or not evaluated, along with the boundary of validity. The audit employs three tools—oracle policies, perfect component replacements, and verifier‑score tests—to trace value changes, locate lost value, and assess verifier effectiveness, demonstrated on a portfolio‑allocation agent in a synthetic market.
arXiv:2607. 08665v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Routing among large language models (LLMs) trades response quality against serving cost, motivated by the reported gap between deployed routers and a per-instance oracle.