Papers for

competitive programming platform operators

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Meta optimization improves automated creation of harder benchmarks

MetaBench-Harness: Unlocking End-to-End Optimization of Benchmark Harnesses

Abstract: Rapid progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) is saturating static benchmarks faster than they can be designed. While existing automated evolution frameworks attempt to generate harder questions by perturbing individual tasks, they remain constrained by rigid, hard-coded generation rules. Moving beyond the evolution of isolated tasks, we propose to optimize the benchmark generation workflow itself end to end with MetaBench-Harness, a dual-loop search framework. Specifically, the inner loop utilizes a benchmark harness to generate a new benchmark in each round, while the outer meta-harness orchestration layer iteratively refines and searches over harness implementations based on historical evolution trajectories. By applying MetaBench-Harness to the competitive programming CodeContests and Olympiad mathematics AIME-2024 datasets, we demonstrate that the evolved benchmarks are challenging and discriminative for frontier models. Trajectory and quality analyses verify that MetaBench-Harness enables multi-dimensional evolution, steadily improving evolution reasonableness, benchmark competency, and evaluator robustness across successive rounds. Furthermore, case studies reveal its effective utilization of diverse difficulty levers to reframe problems and elevate required capabilities. Ultimately, this work provides a solution to the pressing challenge of benchmark saturation.

Sun 27 SeptArtificial IntelligenceComputation and LanguageSoftware Engineering
The gist
Benchmarks are tests used to measure how well AI models perform on various tasks. The authors point out that current benchmarks become too easy quickly as models improve, and existing methods to create harder tests are limited by fixed rules. They developed MetaBench-Harness, a two-level system that automatically improves and evolves the process of creating new benchmarks. Tested on programming and math challenge datasets, their approach generated harder and more useful tests for advanced AI models. This method helps keep benchmark challenges relevant as AI technology advances.
Open → 2609.33411v1