# Post-Training Language Models for Gold-Medal Performance in Coding Competitions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02849 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02849/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 15 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning for agents, planning and code](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-for-agents-planning-and-code/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14476/) (2025)
- [LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07974/) (2024)
- [Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03314/) (2024)
- [Competition-Level Code Generation with AlphaCode](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07814/) (2022)
- [DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19348/) (2026)
- [Large Language Models Cannot Self-Correct Reasoning Yet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01798/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02556/) (2025)
- [OpenCodeReasoning: Advancing Data Distillation for Competitive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01943/) (2025)
- [Nemotron 3 Nano: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20848/) (2025)
- [Code Generation with AlphaCodium: From Prompt Engineering to Flow Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08500/) (2024)
- [S*: Test Time Scaling for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14382/) (2025)
- [Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15007/) (2026)
- [OpenCodeReasoning-II: A Simple Test Time Scaling Approach via Self-Critique](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09075/) (2025)
- [Scaling Test-Time Compute to Achieve IOI Gold Medal with Open-Weight Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14232/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Competitive programming has become a key test of large language model reasoning, with international competitions such as IOI and ICPC representing its most challenging settings. We present an end-to-end specialization pipeline combining large-scale problem curation, synthetic reasoning traces, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning (RL). Using 22,000 curated problems, we train Nemotron-3-Nano-CC (30B-A3B) with SFT and RL and Nemotron-3-Ultra-CC (550B-A55B) with SFT alone. We further introduce GenCorrect, a feedback-driven test-time compute strategy that iteratively generates, evaluates, and refines diverse solutions. On IOI 2025, Nano-CC improves from 130 points to 291 after post-training and to 468 with GenCorrect, exceeding the gold threshold of 438.3 while Ultra-CC reaches 502. Guided by these results, we develop a competition-specific Ultra-CC system and evaluate it prospectively during IOI 2026. Under the same time, internet-access, and submission constraints as human contestants, it scores 535.4 out of 600, exceeding both the gold threshold of 361.12 and the top human score of 498.27. To our knowledge, this is the first AI system to outscore the highest-scoring human contestant on an IOI problem set.