Epoch AI's InnovationEval finds frontier agents reach only 15% of SDPO's gains on automated AI R&D

6 Sol and Fable 5 with independently rediscovering a novel post-training technique comparable to Self-Distillation Policy Optimization (SDPO), giving each 3,000 GPU-hours in a sandbox without internet access. 6 Sol's method, largely copied from prior work, reached 15% of SDPO's gains after adjusting for slower training, while Fable 5's technique failed to improve performance.