AlgoTune: Can Language Models Speed Up General-Purpose Numerical Programs?

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Main Authors: Press, Ori, Amos, Brandon, Zhao, Haoyu, Wu, Yikai, Ainsworth, Samuel K., Krupke, Dominik, Kidger, Patrick, Sajed, Touqir, Stellato, Bartolomeo, Park, Jisun, Bosch, Nathanael, Meril, Eli, Steppi, Albert, Zharmagambetov, Arman, Zhang, Fangzhao, Perez-Pineiro, David, Mercurio, Alberto, Zhan, Ni, Abramovich, Talor, Lieret, Kilian, Zhang, Hanlin, Huang, Shirley, Bethge, Matthias, Press, Ofir
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Press, Ori
Amos, Brandon
Zhao, Haoyu
Wu, Yikai
Ainsworth, Samuel K.
Krupke, Dominik
Kidger, Patrick
Sajed, Touqir
Stellato, Bartolomeo
Park, Jisun
Bosch, Nathanael
Meril, Eli
Steppi, Albert
Zharmagambetov, Arman
Zhang, Fangzhao
Perez-Pineiro, David
Mercurio, Alberto
Zhan, Ni
Abramovich, Talor
Lieret, Kilian
Zhang, Hanlin
Huang, Shirley
Bethge, Matthias
Press, Ofir
author_facet Press, Ori
Amos, Brandon
Zhao, Haoyu
Wu, Yikai
Ainsworth, Samuel K.
Krupke, Dominik
Kidger, Patrick
Sajed, Touqir
Stellato, Bartolomeo
Park, Jisun
Bosch, Nathanael
Meril, Eli
Steppi, Albert
Zharmagambetov, Arman
Zhang, Fangzhao
Perez-Pineiro, David
Mercurio, Alberto
Zhan, Ni
Abramovich, Talor
Lieret, Kilian
Zhang, Hanlin
Huang, Shirley
Bethge, Matthias
Press, Ofir
contents Despite progress in language model (LM) capabilities, evaluations have thus far focused on models' performance on tasks that humans have previously solved, including in programming (Jimenez et al., 2024) and mathematics (Glazer et al., 2024). We therefore propose testing models' ability to design and implement algorithms in an open-ended benchmark: We task LMs with writing code that efficiently solves computationally challenging problems in computer science, physics, and mathematics. Our AlgoTune benchmark consists of 154 coding tasks collected from domain experts and a framework for validating and timing LM-synthesized solution code, which is compared to reference implementations from popular open-source packages. In addition, we develop a baseline LM agent, AlgoTuner, and evaluate its performance across a suite of frontier models. AlgoTuner uses a simple, budgeted loop that edits code, compiles and runs it, profiles performance, verifies correctness on tests, and selects the fastest valid version. AlgoTuner achieves an average 1.72x speedup against our reference solvers, which use libraries such as SciPy, sk-learn and CVXPY. However, we find that current models fail to discover algorithmic innovations, instead preferring surface-level optimizations. We hope that AlgoTune catalyzes the development of LM agents exhibiting creative problem solving beyond state-of-the-art human performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_15887
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AlgoTune: Can Language Models Speed Up General-Purpose Numerical Programs?
Press, Ori
Amos, Brandon
Zhao, Haoyu
Wu, Yikai
Ainsworth, Samuel K.
Krupke, Dominik
Kidger, Patrick
Sajed, Touqir
Stellato, Bartolomeo
Park, Jisun
Bosch, Nathanael
Meril, Eli
Steppi, Albert
Zharmagambetov, Arman
Zhang, Fangzhao
Perez-Pineiro, David
Mercurio, Alberto
Zhan, Ni
Abramovich, Talor
Lieret, Kilian
Zhang, Hanlin
Huang, Shirley
Bethge, Matthias
Press, Ofir
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Despite progress in language model (LM) capabilities, evaluations have thus far focused on models' performance on tasks that humans have previously solved, including in programming (Jimenez et al., 2024) and mathematics (Glazer et al., 2024). We therefore propose testing models' ability to design and implement algorithms in an open-ended benchmark: We task LMs with writing code that efficiently solves computationally challenging problems in computer science, physics, and mathematics. Our AlgoTune benchmark consists of 154 coding tasks collected from domain experts and a framework for validating and timing LM-synthesized solution code, which is compared to reference implementations from popular open-source packages. In addition, we develop a baseline LM agent, AlgoTuner, and evaluate its performance across a suite of frontier models. AlgoTuner uses a simple, budgeted loop that edits code, compiles and runs it, profiles performance, verifies correctness on tests, and selects the fastest valid version. AlgoTuner achieves an average 1.72x speedup against our reference solvers, which use libraries such as SciPy, sk-learn and CVXPY. However, we find that current models fail to discover algorithmic innovations, instead preferring surface-level optimizations. We hope that AlgoTune catalyzes the development of LM agents exhibiting creative problem solving beyond state-of-the-art human performance.
title AlgoTune: Can Language Models Speed Up General-Purpose Numerical Programs?
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15887