๐งฌ 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 โ sharing the core ideas below.
Darwin Family is a training-free evolutionary merging framework. By recombining the weight spaces of existing LLM checkpoints โ with zero gradient-based training โ it reaches frontier-level reasoning.
- ๐ Darwin-28B-Opus: GPQA Diamond 88.89% - ๐ธ Zero gradient steps โ not a single B200 or H200 hour needed - ๐งฌ Consistent gains across 4B โ 35B scale - ๐ Cross-architecture breeding between Transformer and Mamba families - ๐ Stable recursive multi-generation evolution
#Three Core Mechanisms
โ 14-dim Adaptive Merge Genome โ fine-grained recombination at both component level (Attention / FFN / MLP / LayerNorm / Embedding) and block level, expanding the prior evolutionary-merge search space.
โก MRI-Trust Fusion โ 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 โ Darwin learns the balance from data.