cs.LGJul 16, 2026

CASP: Learning-Augmented Offline Approximation with Verifiable Certificates and Bounded-Loss PAC Guarantees

Authors: Haifeng LiMo Hai

Organizations: School of Information, Central University of Finance and Economics Beijing 102206, China

Abstract

Machine-learned predictions can speed up offline NP-hard optimization, but asking a predictor what to do amounts to asking it to solve the problem, and committing an unchecked prediction forfeits every worst-case guarantee. CASP (Certificate-Augmented Solution Pruning) instead asks which parts of the search space may be ignored, and accepts each answer only after a sound polynomial-time verifier has checked it, so correctness never depends on prediction quality. We develop the learning theory of this design. The verifier makes the induced loss class uniformly bounded, so certificate parameters are learnable from O~(ε2logK)\tilde O(\varepsilon^{-2}\log K) samples (KK the maximum instance size), whereas the unverified commitment class admits no distribution-free rate and, under cost spread RR, none below Ω(R/ε2)Ω(R/\varepsilon^2). Filtering noisy predictions by verifiable confidence dominates the standard min-combiner, with a margin we compute in closed form, and the prediction stays useful even given the LP, because it breaks ties on degenerate optimal faces, where every symmetric LP policy, meaning one whose commitments depend on the instance only through the verifiable confidence values, provably stalls. Experiments on five problems test the theory's quantitative predictions. With trained predictors, unverified pruning loses up to 2626% of the optimum under distribution shift, while the verified deployment of the same predictions loses nothing.

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