The final days of the AI Mathematical Olympiad's latest competition were a transcontinental relay for team NVIDIA.
Every evening, two team members on opposite ends of the U.S. would submit an AI reasoning model to Kaggle - the online Olympics of data science and machine learning. They'd wait a tense five hours before learning how well the model tackled a sample set of 50 complex math problems.
After seeing the results, the U.S. team would pass the baton to teammates waking up in Armenia, Finland, Germany and Northern Ireland, who would spend their day testing, modifying and optimizing different model versions.
Every night I'd be so disappointed in our score, but then I'd wake up and see the messages that came in overnight from teammates in Europe, said Igor Gitman, senior applied scientist. My hopes would go up and we'd try again.
While the team was disheartened by their lack of improvement on the public dataset during the competition's final days, the real test of an AI model is how well it can generalize to unseen data. That's where their reasoning model leapt to the top of the leaderboard - correctly answering 34 out of 50 Olympiad questions within a five-hour time limit using a cluster of four NVIDIA L4 GPUs.
We got the magic in the end, said Northern Ireland-based team member Darragh Hanley, a Kaggle grandmaster and senior large language model (LLM) technologist.
Building a Winning Equation The NVIDIA team competed under the name NemoSkills - a nod to their use of the NeMo-Skills collection of pipelines for accelerated LLM training, evaluation and inference. The seven members each contributed different areas of expertise, spanning LLM training, model distillation and inference optimization.
For the Kaggle challenge, over 2,200 participating teams submitted AI models tasked with solving 50 math questions - complex problems at the National Olympiad level, spanning algebra, geometry, combinatorics and number theory - within five hours.
https://blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Sample-Reasoning-AI.mp4
The team's winning model uses a combination of natural language reasoning and Python code execution.
To complete this inference challenge on the small cluster of NVIDIA L4 GPUs available via Kaggle, the NemoSkills team had to get creative.
Their winning model used Qwen2.5-14B-Base, a foundation model with chain-of-thought reasoning capabilities which the team fine-tuned on millions of synthetically generated solutions to math problems.
These synthetic solutions were primarily generated by two larger reasoning models - DeepSeek-R1 and QwQ-32B - and used to teach the team's foundation model via a form of knowledge distillation. The end result was a smaller, faster, long-thinking model capable of tackling complex problems using a combination of natural language reasoning and Python code execution.
To further boost performance, the team's solution reasons through multiple long-thinking responses in parallel before determining a final answer. To optimize this process and meet the competition's time limit, the team also used an innovative early-stopping technique.
A reasoning model might, for example, be set to answer a math problem 12 different times before picking the most common response. Using the asynchronous processing capabilities of NeMo-Skills and NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM, the team was able to monitor and exit inference early if the model had already converged at the correct answer four or more times.
TensorRT-LLM also enabled the team to harness FP8 quantization, a compression method that resulted in a 1.5x speedup over using the more commonly used FP16 format. ReDrafter, a speculative decoding technique developed by Apple, was used for a further 1.8x speedup.
The final model performed even better on the competition's unseen final dataset than it did on the public dataset - a sign that the team successfully built a generalizable model and avoided overfitting their LLM to the sample data.
Even without the Kaggle competition, we'd still be working to improve AI reasoning models for math, said Gitman. But Kaggle gives us the opportunity to benchmark and discover how well our models generalize to a third-party dataset.
Sharing the Wealth The team will soon release a technical report detailing the techniques used in their winning solution - and plans to share their dataset and a series of models on Hugging Face. The advancements and optimizations they made over the course of the competition have been integrated into NeMo-Skills pipelines available on GitHub.
Key data, technology, and insights from this pipeline were also used to train the just-released NVIDIA Llama Nemotron Ultra model.
Throughout this collaboration, we used tools across the NVIDIA software stack, said Christof Henkel, a member of the Kaggle Grandmasters of NVIDIA, known as KGMON. By working closely with our LLM research and development teams, we're able to take what we learn from the competition on a day-to-day basis and push those optimizations into NVIDIA's open-source libraries.
After the competition win, Henkel regained the title of Kaggle World Champion - ranking No. 1 among the platform's over 23 million users. Another teammate, Finland-based Ivan Sorokin, earned the Kaggle Grandmaster title, held by just over 350 people around the world.
For their first-place win, the group also won a $262,144 prize that they're directing to the NVIDIA Foundation to support charitable organizations.
Meet the full team - Igor Gitman, Darragh Hanley, Christof Henkel, Ivan Moshkov, Benedikt Schifferer, Ivan Sorokin and Shubham Toshniwal - in the video below:
Sample math questions in the featured visual above are from the 2025 American Invitational Mathematics Examination. Find the full set of questions and solutions on the Art
More from Nvidia
13/09/2025
Celtic languages - including Cornish, Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh - are the U.K.'s oldest living languages. To empower their speakers, the UK-LLM sover...
10/09/2025
GeForce NOW Blackwell RTX 5080-class SuperPODs are now rolling out, unlocking a new level of ultra high-performance, cinematic cloud gaming.
GeForce NOW Ultima...
09/09/2025
Inference has emerged as the new frontier of complexity in AI. Modern models are...
09/09/2025
As large language models (LLMs) grow larger, they get smarter, with open models from leading developers now featuring hundreds of billions of parameters. At the...
09/09/2025
At this week's AI Infrastructure Summit in Silicon Valley, NVIDIA's VP o...
09/09/2025
Inference performance is critical, as it directly influences the economics of an AI factory. The higher the throughput of AI factory infrastructure, the more to...
09/09/2025
At this week's IAA Mobility conference in Munich, NVIDIA Vice President of A...
09/09/2025
ComfyUI - an open-source, node-based graphical interface for running and buildin...
04/09/2025
NVIDIA today announced new AI education support for K-12 programs at a White House event to celebrate public-private partnerships that advance artificial intell...
04/09/2025
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI On blog series, which explores the latest techniques and real-world applications of agentic AI, chatbots and copi...
04/09/2025
NVIDIA Blackwell RTX is coming to the cloud on Wednesday, Sept. 10 - an upgrade ...
03/09/2025
3D artists are constantly prototyping.
In traditional workflows, modelers must build placeholder, low-fidelity assets to populate 3D scenes, tinkering and adju...
02/09/2025
For more than a century, meteorologists have chased storms with chalkboards, equ...
28/08/2025
Brace yourself, COGs - the Locusts aren't the only thing rising up. The Coal...
28/08/2025
Last week at Gamescom, NVIDIA announced the winners of the NVIDIA and ModDB RTX ...
27/08/2025
AI models are advancing at a rapid rate and scale.
But what might they lack that (most) humans don't? Common sense: an understanding, developed through rea...
25/08/2025
Robots around the world are about to get a lot smarter as physical AI developers...
25/08/2025
As autonomous vehicle systems rapidly grow in complexity, equipped with reasonin...
22/08/2025
As the latest member of the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture family, the NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPU builds on core innovations to accelerate training and AI reason...
22/08/2025
AI reasoning, inference and networking will be top of mind for attendees of next...
21/08/2025
Japan is once again building a landmark high-performance computing system - not ...
21/08/2025
From AI assistants doing deep research to autonomous vehicles making split-second navigation decisions, AI adoption is exploding across industries.
Behind ever...
21/08/2025
Across the globe, AI factories are rising - massive new data centers built not to serve up web pages or email, but to train and deploy intelligence itself. Inte...
21/08/2025
Get a glimpse into the future of gaming.
The NVIDIA Blackwell RTX architecture is coming to GeForce NOW in September, marking the service's biggest upgrade...
20/08/2025
Editor's note: This blog is a part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused o...
18/08/2025
With over 175 games now supporting NVIDIA DLSS 4 - a suite of advanced, AI-power...
18/08/2025
At Gamescom, NVIDIA is releasing its first major update to Project G Assist - an...
15/08/2025
Of around 7,000 languages in the world, a tiny fraction are supported by AI lang...
14/08/2025
NVIDIA is partnering with the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to create a...
14/08/2025
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Definitive Edition is marching onto GeForce NOW,...
13/08/2025
Black Forest Labs' FLUX.1 Kontext [dev] image editing model is now available as an NVIDIA NIM microservice.
FLUX.1 models allow users to edit existing imag...
11/08/2025
Using NVIDIA digital twin technologies, Amazon Devices & Services is powering bi...
11/08/2025
Packing the power of the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture in compact, energy-effici...
11/08/2025
Physical AI is becoming the foundation of smart cities, facilities and industria...
07/08/2025
This GFN Thursday brings an offer members can't refuse - 2K's highly ant...
05/08/2025
Two new open-weight AI reasoning models from OpenAI released today bring cutting...
05/08/2025
In collaboration with OpenAI, NVIDIA has optimized the company's new open-so...
05/08/2025
NVIDIA and OpenAI began pushing the boundaries of AI with the launch of NVIDIA D...
05/08/2025
NVIDIA GPUs are at the heart of modern computing. They're used across industries - from healthcare and finance to scientific research, autonomous systems an...
31/07/2025
August brings new levels of gaming excitement on GeForce NOW, with 2,300 titles now available to stream in the cloud.
Grab a controller and get ready for epic ...
31/07/2025
Interest in generative AI is continuing to grow, as new models include more capabilities. With the latest advancements, even enthusiasts without a developer bac...
29/07/2025
FourCastNet3 (FCN3) is the latest AI global weather forecasting system from NVID...
28/07/2025
The electrical grid is designed to support loads that are relatively steady, such as lighting, household appliances, and industrial machines that operate at con...
24/07/2025
For media company Black Mixture, AI isn't just a tool - it's an entire p...
24/07/2025
Sharpen the blade and brace for a journey steeped in myth and mystery. WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers has launched in the cloud.
Ride in style with skateboarding leg...
23/07/2025
In today's fast-evolving digital landscape, marketing teams face increasing ...
22/07/2025
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI On blog series, which explores th...
17/07/2025
Listen up citizens, the law is back and patrolling the cloud. Nacon's RoboCop Rogue City - Unfinished Business launches today in the cloud, bringing justice...
15/07/2025
Submissions for NVIDIA's Plug and Play: Project G-Assist Plug-In Hackathon a...
The final days of the AI Mathematical Olympiad's latest competition were a transcontinental relay for team NVIDIA.
