ARC Prize 2025

The Grand Prize remains unclaimed.

ARC Prize 2025 Analysis

Top solution approaches
Analysis & key insights
The future of ARC Prize

All scores & papers below are open source & reproducible.

2025 High Score Winners

1st	NVARC Code\|Paper\|Video	24.0%	$25k
2nd	the ARChitects Code\|Paper\|Video	16.5%	$10k
3rd	MindsAI Code\|Paper\|Video	12.6%	$5k
4th	Lonnie Code Paper	6.7%	$5k
5th	G. Barbadillo Code Paper	6.5%	$5k

Score: ARC-AGI-2 Private Evaluation / Cost per task: USD $0.20

All scores & papers below are open source & reproducible. See results on Kaggle.

2025 Paper Award Winners

1st Place - $50k

"Less is More: Recursive Reasoning with Tiny Networks" Interview
A. Jolicoeur-Martineau

2nd Place - $20k

"Self-Improving Language Models for Evolutionary Program Synthesis: A Case Study on ARC-AGI" Interview
J. Pourcel, C. Colas & P. Oudeyer

3rd Place - $5k

"ARC-AGI Without Pretraining" Interview
I. Liao & A. Gu

Runners Up - $2.5k

"Vector Symbolic Algebras for the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus"
I. Joffe & C. Eliasmith

"From Parrots to Von Neumanns: How Evolutionary Test-Time Compute Achieved State-of-the-Art on ARC-AGI"
J. Berman

"Efficient Evolutionary Program Synthesis"
E. Pang

"ARC-NCA: Towards Developmental Solutions to the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus"
E. Guichard, F. Reimers, M. Kvalsund, M. Lepperød & S. Nichele

"ArcMemo: Abstract Reasoning Composition with Lifelong LLM Memory"
M. Ho et al.

Honorable Mentions

"ARC-AGI is a Vision Problem!"
K. Hu et al.

"Product of Experts with LLMs: Boosting Performance on ARC Is a Matter of Perspective" Interview
D. Franzen, J. Disselhoff & D. Hartmann

"Exploring the combination of search and learn for the ARC25 challenge"
G. Barbadillo

"Beyond Brute Force: A Neuro-Symbolic Architecture for Compositional Reasoning in ARC-AGI-2"
A. Das, O. Ghugarkar, V. Bhat & J. McAuley

"Test-time Adaptation of Tiny Recursive Models"
R. McGovern

"Rethinking Visual Intelligence: Insights from Video Pretraining"
P. Acuaviva et al.

"Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater: How and why deep learning for ARC" Interview
J. Cole & M. Osman

"NVARC solution to ARC-AGI-2 2025"
I. Sorokin & Jean-François Puget

Winner Interviews

Top Scores

1st Place: NVARC

A synthetic-data-driven ensemble of an improved Architects-style test-time-trained model and TRM-based components that reaches ~24% on ARC-AGI-2 under contest constraints.

2nd Place: the ARChitects

A 2D-aware masked-diffusion LLM with recursive self-refinement and perspective-based scoring achieves top-tier ARC-AGI-2 performance, improving substantially over the team's 2024 autoregressive system.

3rd Place: MindsAI

A heavily engineered test-time-training pipeline that combines TTFT, augmentation ensembles, tokenizer dropout, and some new pretraining tricks to produce a competitive 15.42% ARC-AGI-2 score.

Paper Awards

1st Place: Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau

Tiny Recursive Model (TRM) is a ~7M-parameter, single-network recursive model with separate answer and latent states that, via deep supervised refinement, attains ~45% on ARC-AGI-1 and ~8% on ARC-AGI-2.

2nd Place: Julien Pourcel et al.

SOAR is a self-improving evolutionary program synthesis framework that fine-tunes an LLM on its own search traces, boosting open-source ARC-AGI-1 solution performance up to 52% without human-engineered DSLs or solution datasets.

3rd Place: Isaac Liao et al.

CompressARC is an MDL-based, single puzzle-trained neural code golf system that achieves ~20–34% on ARC-AGI-1 and ~4% on ARC-AGI-2 without any pretraining or external data.

ARC Prize in 2026

Congratulations to the winners! Now, where do we go from here?

Intelligence is interactive. ARC-AGI-3 is in development, bringing temporal and agentic elements to the benchmark. Expect to see competitions in 2026 focused on this exciting new paradigm.

ARC-AGI-2 remains undefeated and continues to teach us important things about the gap between artificial and human intelligence. Expect to see more competitions grounded in this benchmark, as well.

The exact shape of what's to come is yet to be determined. We welcome feedback from the community.

We'll announce more competition details early next year. Stay tuned!