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Auteurs principaux: Dang, Xingyu, Agarwal, Rohit, Porto, Rodrigo, Goyal, Anirudh, Fowl, Liam H, Arora, Sanjeev
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16793
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author Dang, Xingyu
Agarwal, Rohit
Porto, Rodrigo
Goyal, Anirudh
Fowl, Liam H
Arora, Sanjeev
author_facet Dang, Xingyu
Agarwal, Rohit
Porto, Rodrigo
Goyal, Anirudh
Fowl, Liam H
Arora, Sanjeev
contents In the past year, custom and unreleased math reasoning models reached gold medal performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). Similar performance was then reported using large-scale inference on publicly available models but at prohibitive costs (e.g., 3000 USD per problem). In this work, we present an inference pipeline that attains best-in-class performance on IMO-style math problems at an average inference cost orders of magnitude below competing methods while using only general-purpose off-the-shelf models. Our method relies on insights about grader failure in solver-grader pipelines, which we call the Cognitive Well (iterative refinement converging to a wrong solution that the solver as well as the pipeline's internal grader consider to be basically correct). Our pipeline addresses these failure modes through conjecture extraction, wherein candidate lemmas are isolated from generated solutions and independently verified alongside their negations in a fresh environment (context detachment). On IMO-ProofBench Advanced (PB-Adv), our pipeline achieves 67.1 percent performance using Gemini 3.0 Pro with an average cost per question of approximately 31 USD. At the time of evaluation, this represented the state-of-the-art on PB-Adv among both public and unreleased models, and more than doubles the success rate of the next best publicly accessible pipeline, all at a fraction of the cost.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_16793
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Escaping the Cognitive Well: Efficient Competition Math with Off-the-Shelf Models
Dang, Xingyu
Agarwal, Rohit
Porto, Rodrigo
Goyal, Anirudh
Fowl, Liam H
Arora, Sanjeev
Machine Learning
In the past year, custom and unreleased math reasoning models reached gold medal performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). Similar performance was then reported using large-scale inference on publicly available models but at prohibitive costs (e.g., 3000 USD per problem). In this work, we present an inference pipeline that attains best-in-class performance on IMO-style math problems at an average inference cost orders of magnitude below competing methods while using only general-purpose off-the-shelf models. Our method relies on insights about grader failure in solver-grader pipelines, which we call the Cognitive Well (iterative refinement converging to a wrong solution that the solver as well as the pipeline's internal grader consider to be basically correct). Our pipeline addresses these failure modes through conjecture extraction, wherein candidate lemmas are isolated from generated solutions and independently verified alongside their negations in a fresh environment (context detachment). On IMO-ProofBench Advanced (PB-Adv), our pipeline achieves 67.1 percent performance using Gemini 3.0 Pro with an average cost per question of approximately 31 USD. At the time of evaluation, this represented the state-of-the-art on PB-Adv among both public and unreleased models, and more than doubles the success rate of the next best publicly accessible pipeline, all at a fraction of the cost.
title Escaping the Cognitive Well: Efficient Competition Math with Off-the-Shelf Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16793