Epi: Towards a Persistent, Self-Improving Agent for Autonomous Research
We present Épi, an autonomous research agent that sustains investigations across model sessions and evolves its methods through accumulated experience. Épi combines persistent research history, hierarchical memory, branching and independent review to maintain research continuity, learn from experiments, and explore and revisit alternative approaches.
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Key points
- Its experiments run across session boundaries, and a fixed verifier evaluates their outputs. Épi produced 120 record-setting results, comprising 20 numerical bound records across 12 families and 100 construction records across eight families.
- Beyond numerical improvements, Épi gives a computer-assisted proof of Tuza's conjecture for split graphs with an eight-vertex clique part and at most three triangle-active neighborhood types, with arbitrary multiplicities.
- We extend this research process to algorithmic coding with Épi-turbo, a lightweight configuration that develops executable solvers for tasks including vehicle routing, scheduling and production planning.
- On 30 FrontierOR tasks, Épi-turbo achieves a 5.4% higher total benchmark score than Codex at 64% of its model cost, using the same underlying model and reasoning effort. Épi is designed to support human understanding by connecting computational results to explicit methods and mathematical arguments that researchers can examine and build upon.
Sources (2)
- [1]Epi: Towards a Persistent, Self-Improving Agent for Autonomous ResearcharXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 18, 01:30 AM
We present Épi, an autonomous research agent that sustains investigations across model sessions and evolves its methods through accumulated experience. Épi combines persistent research history, hierarchical memory, branching and independent review to maintain research continuity, learn from experiments, and explore and revisit alternative approaches.
Its experiments run across session boundaries, and a fixed verifier evaluates their outputs. Épi produced 120 record-setting results, comprising 20 numerical bound records across 12 families and 100 construction records across eight families.
- [2]Epi: Towards a Persistent, Self-Improving Agent for Autonomous ResearchHugging Face Daily Papers · Oct 18, 12:00 AM · same content
Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.
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