Achieving Gold-Medal-Level Olympiad Reasoning via Simple and Unified Scaling
On the map: LLM reasoning → Mathematical reasoning
Abstract (arXiv)
Recent progress in reasoning models has substantially advanced long-horizon mathematical and scientific problem solving, with several systems now reaching gold-medal-level performance on International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) and International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) problems. In this paper, we introduce a simple and unified recipe for converting a post-trained reasoning backbone into a rigorous olympiad-level solver. The recipe first uses a reverse-perplexity curriculum for SFT to instill rigorous proof-search and self-checking behaviors, then scales these behaviors through a two-stage RL pipeline that progresses from RL with verifiable rewards to more delicate proof-level RL, and finally boosts solving performance with test-time scaling. Applying this recipe, we train a 30B-A3B backbone with SFT on around 340K sub-8K-token trajectories followed by 200 RL steps. The resulting model, SU-01, supports stable reasoning on difficult problems with trajectories exceeding 100K tokens, while achieving gold-medal-level performance on mathematical and physical olympiad competitions, including IMO 2025/USAMO 2026 and IPhO 2024/2025. It also demonstrates strong generalization of scientific reasoning to domains beyond mathematics and physics.
Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Mathematical reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. First posted on arXiv 13 May 2026.
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 7.
7 papers.
- 2026MaxProof: Scaling Mathematical Proof with Generative-Verifier RL and Population-Level Test-Time Scalingcited by 4
- 2026SimpleOPD: Simple Tokenizer-Agnostic On-Policy Distillation for Long-Context Reasoningcited by 4
- 2026Artificial Intelligence for Mathematical Reasoning: An Integrated Survey of Language Models, Neuro-symbolic Systems, and Verified Discoverycited by 1
- 2026Parametric Skillscited by 1
- 2026Rethinking Critic Learning in PPO: Understanding and Mitigating Value Flatteningcited by 1
- 2026ComBench: A Benchmark for Rigorous Proof Reasoning and Constructive Realization in Olympiad-Level Combinatoricscited by 0
- 2026UMoE:Unlocking Every Expert in Domain-Specific Trainingcited by 0
- 2026Rethinking Critic Learning in PPO: Understanding and Mitigating Value Flattening16 Sep 2026
- 2026SimpleOPD: Simple Tokenizer-Agnostic On-Policy Distillation for Long-Context Reasoning14 Aug 2026
- 2026UMoE:Unlocking Every Expert in Domain-Specific Training13 Jul 2026
- 2026Parametric Skills29 Jun 2026
- 2026MaxProof: Scaling Mathematical Proof with Generative-Verifier RL and Population-Level Test-Time Scaling11 Jun 2026
- 2026ComBench: A Benchmark for Rigorous Proof Reasoning and Constructive Realization in Olympiad-Level Combinatorics9 Jun 2026
- 2026Artificial Intelligence for Mathematical Reasoning: An Integrated Survey of Language Models, Neuro-symbolic Systems, and Verified Discovery7 Jun 2026
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