𧬠Darwin Family: Zero Gradient Steps, GPQA Diamond 88.89%
How far can we push LLM reasoning *without* training?
Our team at VIDRAFT submitted this paper to Daily Papers yesterday, and it's currently #3. Huge thanks to everyone who upvoted ā sharing the core ideas below.
Darwin Family is a training-free evolutionary merging framework. By recombining the weight spaces of existing LLM checkpoints ā with zero gradient-based training ā it reaches frontier-level reasoning.
- š Darwin-28B-Opus: GPQA Diamond 88.89% - šø Zero gradient steps ā not a single B200 or H200 hour needed - 𧬠Consistent gains across 4B ā 35B scale - š Cross-architecture breeding between Transformer and Mamba families - š Stable recursive multi-generation evolution
#Three Core Mechanisms
ā 14-dim Adaptive Merge Genome ā fine-grained recombination at both component level (Attention / FFN / MLP / LayerNorm / Embedding) and block level, expanding the prior evolutionary-merge search space.
ā” MRI-Trust Fusion ā we diagnose each layer's reasoning contribution via an **MRI (Model Reasoning Importance)** signal and fuse it with evolutionary search through a **learnable trust parameter**. Trust the diagnostic too much and search collapses; ignore it and search becomes inefficient ā Darwin learns the balance from data.