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Main Authors: OpenAI, :, El-Kishky, Ahmed, Wei, Alexander, Saraiva, Andre, Minaiev, Borys, Selsam, Daniel, Dohan, David, Song, Francis, Lightman, Hunter, Clavera, Ignasi, Pachocki, Jakub, Tworek, Jerry, Kuhn, Lorenz, Kaiser, Lukasz, Chen, Mark, Schwarzer, Max, Rohaninejad, Mostafa, McAleese, Nat, contributors, o3, Mürk, Oleg, Garg, Rhythm, Shu, Rui, Sidor, Szymon, Kosaraju, Vineet, Zhou, Wenda
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06807
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author OpenAI
:
El-Kishky, Ahmed
Wei, Alexander
Saraiva, Andre
Minaiev, Borys
Selsam, Daniel
Dohan, David
Song, Francis
Lightman, Hunter
Clavera, Ignasi
Pachocki, Jakub
Tworek, Jerry
Kuhn, Lorenz
Kaiser, Lukasz
Chen, Mark
Schwarzer, Max
Rohaninejad, Mostafa
McAleese, Nat
contributors, o3
Mürk, Oleg
Garg, Rhythm
Shu, Rui
Sidor, Szymon
Kosaraju, Vineet
Zhou, Wenda
author_facet OpenAI
:
El-Kishky, Ahmed
Wei, Alexander
Saraiva, Andre
Minaiev, Borys
Selsam, Daniel
Dohan, David
Song, Francis
Lightman, Hunter
Clavera, Ignasi
Pachocki, Jakub
Tworek, Jerry
Kuhn, Lorenz
Kaiser, Lukasz
Chen, Mark
Schwarzer, Max
Rohaninejad, Mostafa
McAleese, Nat
contributors, o3
Mürk, Oleg
Garg, Rhythm
Shu, Rui
Sidor, Szymon
Kosaraju, Vineet
Zhou, Wenda
contents We show that reinforcement learning applied to large language models (LLMs) significantly boosts performance on complex coding and reasoning tasks. Additionally, we compare two general-purpose reasoning models - OpenAI o1 and an early checkpoint of o3 - with a domain-specific system, o1-ioi, which uses hand-engineered inference strategies designed for competing in the 2024 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). We competed live at IOI 2024 with o1-ioi and, using hand-crafted test-time strategies, placed in the 49th percentile. Under relaxed competition constraints, o1-ioi achieved a gold medal. However, when evaluating later models such as o3, we find that o3 achieves gold without hand-crafted domain-specific strategies or relaxed constraints. Our findings show that although specialized pipelines such as o1-ioi yield solid improvements, the scaled-up, general-purpose o3 model surpasses those results without relying on hand-crafted inference heuristics. Notably, o3 achieves a gold medal at the 2024 IOI and obtains a Codeforces rating on par with elite human competitors. Overall, these results indicate that scaling general-purpose reinforcement learning, rather than relying on domain-specific techniques, offers a robust path toward state-of-the-art AI in reasoning domains, such as competitive programming.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_06807
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Competitive Programming with Large Reasoning Models
OpenAI
:
El-Kishky, Ahmed
Wei, Alexander
Saraiva, Andre
Minaiev, Borys
Selsam, Daniel
Dohan, David
Song, Francis
Lightman, Hunter
Clavera, Ignasi
Pachocki, Jakub
Tworek, Jerry
Kuhn, Lorenz
Kaiser, Lukasz
Chen, Mark
Schwarzer, Max
Rohaninejad, Mostafa
McAleese, Nat
contributors, o3
Mürk, Oleg
Garg, Rhythm
Shu, Rui
Sidor, Szymon
Kosaraju, Vineet
Zhou, Wenda
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
We show that reinforcement learning applied to large language models (LLMs) significantly boosts performance on complex coding and reasoning tasks. Additionally, we compare two general-purpose reasoning models - OpenAI o1 and an early checkpoint of o3 - with a domain-specific system, o1-ioi, which uses hand-engineered inference strategies designed for competing in the 2024 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). We competed live at IOI 2024 with o1-ioi and, using hand-crafted test-time strategies, placed in the 49th percentile. Under relaxed competition constraints, o1-ioi achieved a gold medal. However, when evaluating later models such as o3, we find that o3 achieves gold without hand-crafted domain-specific strategies or relaxed constraints. Our findings show that although specialized pipelines such as o1-ioi yield solid improvements, the scaled-up, general-purpose o3 model surpasses those results without relying on hand-crafted inference heuristics. Notably, o3 achieves a gold medal at the 2024 IOI and obtains a Codeforces rating on par with elite human competitors. Overall, these results indicate that scaling general-purpose reinforcement learning, rather than relying on domain-specific techniques, offers a robust path toward state-of-the-art AI in reasoning domains, such as competitive programming.
title Competitive Programming with Large Reasoning Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06807