Autoresearch loop on Tinker reproduces self-distillation papers with per-dollar cost forecasts

simonguozirui · x · 2026-09-10

askalphaxiv shows how to build an autoresearch loop with Tinker to reproduce post-training papers at predictable costs.

Problem: dozens of self-distillation methods claim improvements over each other; hard to audit which claims hold.
Method: agents got a Tinker budget and, with just a few user prompts, reproduced self-distillation results automatically, with compute cost forecast accurate to within a dollar.
Results: reproduced SDFT's continual learning benefits across Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-30B-A3B over multiple seeds, and investigated SFT's failure modes.
tinkerapi notes the same loop works for auditing: testing dozens of competing published methods automatically, not just exploratory research.

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