# Athanor preprint reports autonomous agents matching official Qwen model scores

_Published Friday, October 16, 2026 at 6:25 AM EDT · AI, Science · Latest · Tier 2 — Notable_

Researchers report in a preprint that four Claude Opus 5.5 agents autonomously post-trained Qwen3-4B-Base to match or surpass its official instruction-tuned version on average across two evaluation suites. The 104-hour Athanor campaign gave each agent an eight-GPU node and no research advice.

Scores rose from 15.9 to 67.3 on a six-task development suite and from 9.2 to 48.2 on a held-out suite, compared with 66.5 and 47.9 for Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507. Agents built training data, modified algorithms and combined models using public data inside a sandbox that barred external teacher models. The gains came from recombining known methods, including supervised training, reinforcement learning, weight merging and self-distillation.

## Sources

- [cs.LG updates on arXiv.org](https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21055)

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Canonical: https://techandbusiness.org/newswire/3IJ9jKIvBsgae6E6u6aXIP
Published: 2026-10-16T10:25:53.286Z
Story chronology: 2026-10-16T04:00:00.000Z
Retrieved: 2026-10-16T13:02:44.974Z
Publisher: Tech & Business (techandbusiness.org)