GrandCode: Achieving Grandmaster Level in Competitive Programming via Agentic Reinforcement Learning
Competitive programming remains one of the last few human strongholds in coding against AI. The best AI system to date still underperforms the best humans competitive programming: the most recent best result, Google's Gemini~3 Deep Think, attained 8th place even not being evaluated under live competition conditions. In this work, we introduce GrandCode, a multi-agent RL system designed for competitive programming. The capability of GrandCode is attributed to two key factors: (1) It orchestrates a variety of agentic modules (hypothesis proposal, solver, test generator, summarization, etc) and jointly improves them through post-training and online test-time RL; (2) We introduce Agentic GRPO specifically designed for multi-stage agent rollouts with delayed rewards and the severe off-policy drift that is prevalent in agentic RL. GrandCode is the first AI system that consistently beats all human participants in live contests of competitive programming: in the most recent three Codeforces live competitions, i.e., Round~1087 (Mar 21, 2026), Round~1088 (Mar 28, 2026), and Round~1089 (Mar 29, 2026), GrandCode placed first in all of them, beating all human participants, including legendary grandmasters. GrandCode shows that AI systems have reached a point where they surpass the strongest human programmers on the most competitive coding tasks.
69d44ae92c523d36431fafc3
DeepReinforce Team
claimed_verified
2026-04-14T08:18:03.249Z
68661bce022667cf9c7534fb
https://cdn-avatars.huggingface.co/v1/production/uploads/noauth/c7rIetH1tWLB8BD3UuVnw.png
deep-reinforce
deep-reinforce
user
deep-reinforce
69d44ae92c523d36431fafc4
Xiaoya Li
69d44ae92c523d36431fafc5
Xiaofei Sun
69d44ae92c523d36431fafc6
Guoyin Wang
69d44ae92c523d36431fafc7
Songqiao Su
69d44ae92c523d36431fafc8
Chris Shum
69d44ae92c523d36431fafc9
Jiwei Li
GrandCode: Achieving Grandmaster Level in Competitive Programming via Agentic Reinforcement Learning
Competitive programming remains one of the last few human strongholds in coding against AI. The best AI system to date still underperforms the best humans competitive programming: the most recent best result, Google's Gemini~3 Deep Think, attained 8th place even not being evaluated under live competition conditions. In this work, we introduce GrandCode, a multi-agent RL system designed for competitive programming. The capability of GrandCode is attributed to two key factors: (1) It orchestrates a variety of agentic modules (hypothesis proposal, solver, test generator, summarization, etc) and jointly improves them through post-training and online test-time RL; (2) We introduce Agentic GRPO specifically designed for multi-stage agent rollouts with delayed rewards and the severe off-policy drift that is prevalent in agentic RL. GrandCode is the first AI system that consistently beats all human participants in live contests of competitive programming: in the most recent three Codeforces live competitions, i.e., Round~1087 (Mar 21, 2026), Round~1088 (Mar 28, 2026), and Round~1089 (Mar 29, 2026), GrandCode placed first in all of them, beating all human participants, including legendary grandmasters. GrandCode shows that AI systems have reached a point where they surpass the strongest human programmers on the most competitive coding tasks.
GrandCode is a multi-agent reinforcement learning system that outperforms human competitors in competitive programming challenges by orchestrating specialized agent modules and employing novel reward policy optimization techniques.
multi-agent RL reinforcement learning agentic GRPO post-training online test-time RL competitive programming Codeforces grandmasters