Self-improving research agents are one of the most discussed ideas in AI right now.

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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.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24944

Chat with Paper: https://academy.dair.ai/papers/epi-towards-a-persistent-self-improving-agent-for-autonomous-research-2610.24944