Skip to content

Add three loop extension repos (autoexperiment, autoadversary, metaresearch)#2

Open
shyamsivakumar wants to merge 1 commit into
WecoAI:masterfrom
shyamsivakumar:add-loop-extensions
Open

Add three loop extension repos (autoexperiment, autoadversary, metaresearch)#2
shyamsivakumar wants to merge 1 commit into
WecoAI:masterfrom
shyamsivakumar:add-loop-extensions

Conversation

@shyamsivakumar

Copy link
Copy Markdown

Summary

Three novel loop extensions for Karpathy's autoresearch pattern:

autoexperiment

Hypothesis-driven loop requiring the agent to maintain a causal model (theory.md) and track change-type effectiveness (credit.json). Produces transferable knowledge artifacts.

autoadversary

Two-agent adversarial loop with an adversary that systematically finds failure modes, preventing Goodhart's Law. Produces an auto-growing adversarial test suite.

metaresearch

Nested outer loop that optimizes program.md itself - discovering empirically validated research strategies automatically.

All three extend the standard autoresearch loop while using the same nanoGPT base for direct comparability.

@ZhengyaoJiang

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Contributor

Hey, those ideas all sound cool. I’m wondering if you have actual run trajectories. Are they better than the vanilla autoresearch loop (for example, in terms of sample efficiency)?

@shyamsivakumar

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Author

Hey Zhengyao, thanks for asking! We ran a controlled comparison — 4 variants × 10 experiments each, same nanoGPT/TinyShakespeare base (100 training iters/experiment), MiniMax M2.7 as the research agent making per-step decisions.

CleanShot 2026-04-14 at 17 31 23@2x

What we see so far:

  • metaresearch found the steepest improvement curve — the "start with regularization" meta-strategy led it to systematically ramp attn_dropout (0.1→0.15→0.2), finding 3 consecutive wins by exp 5
  • autoexperiment used credit scores to double down on depth (n_layer 8→10→12→14), correctly identifying architecture as the productive axis
  • autoadversary was slower to start but kept improving through exp 10 via cautious regularization (weight_decay + targeted mlp_dropout)
  • vanilla tried things semi-randomly and plateaued early

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Labels

None yet

Projects

None yet

Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

2 participants