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Épi research agent sets 120 records on math problems

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The fixed verifier design is the key detail: it keeps the agent's self-improvement honest by preventing it from altering how its own outputs are judged. Builders working on long-running agents can borrow the pattern of persistent history, versioned branches and independent review. The Épi-turbo comparison against Codex on FrontierOR offers a concrete cost-versus-accuracy reference point for teams automating solver generation.

Épi is a self-improving research agent that keeps working on the same research problem across many model sessions. It has set 120 records, including narrowing the interval for the n-queens constant about 84 times, producing certificates that the Cohn-Elkies bound cannot be sharp in dimensions 10 and 11, and a computer-assisted proof of a case of Tuza's conjecture for split graphs. The system uses persistent research history, hierarchical memory, versioned branches and an independent reviewer, with a fixed verifier scoring every output. A lighter version, Épi-turbo, writes solvers for routing and scheduling problems, scoring 5.4% higher than Codex on 30 FrontierOR tasks at 64% of the model cost with the same model and reasoning effort.

Original · DAIR.AI

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Épi is a research agent that keeps working on the same research problem across many model sessions. It set 120 records, including an interval for the n-queens constant about 84 times narrower than before.

It has a persistent research history, hierarchical memory, versioned branches it can return to, and an independent reviewer. A fixed verifier scores every output, so the agent cannot change how it is judged.

Other results include exact certificates showing the Cohn-Elkies bound cannot be sharp in dimensions 10 and 11, and a computer-assisted proof of a case of Tuza's conjecture for split graphs.

A lighter version, Épi-turbo, writes solvers for routing and scheduling problems. On 30 FrontierOR tasks, it scores 5.4% higher than Codex at 64% of the model cost, with the same model and reasoning effort.

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