ASI-LIB-012 technical architecture discovery

Agentic Discovery of Neural Architectures: AIRA-Compose and AIRA-Design

Alberto Pepe, Chien-Yu Lin, Despoina Magka, Bilge Acun, Yannan Nellie Wu, Anton Protopopov, Carole-Jean Wu, Yoram Bachrach

AIRA-Compose and AIRA-Design benchmark charts
Figure via ar5iv rendering of arXiv:2605.15871

AIRA matters because it moves automated AI R&D down into model architecture. Agents are not just writing wrappers around existing models; they are exploring computational primitives, scaling candidates, and designing mechanisms for long-range dependencies.

Results to watch

The paper reports AIRAformer and AIRAhybrid families, 1B-scale pretraining runs, faster scaling frontiers than several baselines, and agent-written attention mechanisms that approach human state of the art on Long Range Arena tasks.

ASI relevance

If automated architecture discovery becomes reliable, the capability frontier stops depending only on human researchers proposing the next transformer-class breakthrough. The loop becomes: generate architecture, train, evaluate, extrapolate scaling, retain winners, and hand the archive to the next search.