CliffSearch: Structured Agentic Co-Evolution over Theory and Code for Scientific Algorithm Discovery

Scientific algorithm discovery is iterative: hypotheses are proposed, implemented, stress-tested, and revised. Current LLM-guided search systems accelerate proposal generation, but often under-represent scientific structure by optimizing code-only artifacts with weak correctness/originality gating. We present CliffSearch, an agentic evolutionary framework in which the core evolution operators (pair selection, crossover, mutation, and review) are implemented as LLM agents, and the loop is designed around three principles: (1) each node is a structured scientific artifact, instantiated in either theory+code or code_only mode, (2) reviewer judgments of correctness and originality are first-class selection gates alongside optimization of the benchmark metric of interest, and (3) mutation is split into exploration and correction pathways with distinct objectives. Exploration mutation imports ideas from adjacent scientific domains to increase novelty, while correction mutation performs targeted evidence-guided repair using reviewer signals over theory, code, benchmark results, and runtime errors. We illustrate the framework on three benchmark-grounded studies: transformer hyper-connection evolution, optimizer discovery on a fixed nanoGPT stack, and a smaller native-optimizer ablation. Across these settings, the same loop supports explicit metric direction, reproducible persistence, and reviewer-gated comparison of discoveries under controlled search conditions. The result is a discovery workflow that prioritizes scientific interpretability and correctness while optimizing task metrics under controlled novelty constraints, rather than maximizing candidate throughput alone. Full run artifacts, interactive visualizations, and exported best nodes for the reported studies are available at https://cliffsearch.ai .

ITBench: Evaluating AI Agents across Diverse Real-World IT Automation Tasks

Realizing the vision of using AI agents to automate critical IT tasks depends on the ability to measure and understand effectiveness of proposed solutions. We introduce ITBench, a framework that offers a systematic methodology for benchmarking AI agents to address real-world IT automation tasks. Our initial release targets three key areas: Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Compliance and Security Operations (CISO), and Financial Operations (FinOps). The design enables AI researchers to understand the challenges and opportunities of AI agents for IT automation with push-button workflows and interpretable metrics. ITBench includes an initial set of 94 real-world scenarios, which can be easily extended by community contributions. Our results show that agents powered by state-of-the-art models resolve only 13.8% of SRE scenarios, 25.2% of CISO scenarios, and 0% of FinOps scenarios. We expect ITBench to be a key enabler of AI-driven IT automation that is correct, safe, and fast.

The infrastructure powering IBM's Gen AI model development

AI Infrastructure plays a key role in the speed and cost-competitiveness of developing and deploying advanced AI models. The current demand for powerful AI infrastructure for model training is driven by the emergence of generative AI and foundational models, where on occasion thousands of GPUs must cooperate on a single training job for the model to be trained in a reasonable time. Delivering efficient and high-performing AI training requires an end-to-end solution that combines hardware, software and holistic telemetry to cater for multiple types of AI workloads. In this report, we describe IBM's hybrid cloud infrastructure that powers our generative AI model development. This infrastructure includes (1) Vela: an AI-optimized supercomputing capability directly integrated into the IBM Cloud, delivering scalable, dynamic, multi-tenant and geographically distributed infrastructure for large-scale model training and other AI workflow steps and (2) Blue Vela: a large-scale, purpose-built, on-premises hosting environment that is optimized to support our largest and most ambitious AI model training tasks. Vela provides IBM with the dual benefit of high performance for internal use along with the flexibility to adapt to an evolving commercial landscape. Blue Vela provides us with the benefits of rapid development of our largest and most ambitious models, as well as future-proofing against the evolving model landscape in the industry. Taken together, they provide IBM with the ability to rapidly innovate in the development of both AI models and commercial offerings.

Granite Code Models: A Family of Open Foundation Models for Code Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on code are revolutionizing the software development process. Increasingly, code LLMs are being integrated into software development environments to improve the productivity of human programmers, and LLM-based agents are beginning to show promise for handling complex tasks autonomously. Realizing the full potential of code LLMs requires a wide range of capabilities, including code generation, fixing bugs, explaining and documenting code, maintaining repositories, and more. In this work, we introduce the Granite series of decoder-only code models for code generative tasks, trained with code written in 116 programming languages. The Granite Code models family consists of models ranging in size from 3 to 34 billion parameters, suitable for applications ranging from complex application modernization tasks to on-device memory-constrained use cases. Evaluation on a comprehensive set of tasks demonstrates that Granite Code models consistently reaches state-of-the-art performance among available open-source code LLMs. The Granite Code model family was optimized for enterprise software development workflows and performs well across a range of coding tasks (e.g. code generation, fixing and explanation), making it a versatile all around code model. We release all our Granite Code models under an Apache 2.0 license for both research and commercial use.