to add some extra clarification here and a small anecdote, looping was discovered as the primary issue after the main result because we originally thought it was just a pure capability gain on math that it had somehow edited in (an even bigger result that isn’t the case). when Riki and Jayden first presented this result to me, I had a suspicion the large gain in math performance was related to reducing reasoning looping bc I observed a similar effect earlier when training RLMs yielded an odd jump in benchmark scores for a separate paper that was a result of reducing harness-level looping. We discovered Astra indeed used a trick loosely described in based on activation steering to reduce this effect This is also what led to the later ablation about removing looping when the model is told that is the issue but it doesn’t have access to activations. the tldr; is that the LLM-generated prompt does include hints that Qwen would have this issue, but it started (and evolved without human feedback) as the simple unexpanded prompt without this prior. we will make all of this clearer though (we didn’t even realize until after we got the result that looking for looping was present in the LLM optimized prompt, as we ourselves didn’t even know to look for it initially)