Can a Linear Program Do Weight-Space Programming?

# Summary Researchers at MIT CSAIL demonstrated that GPT-6 Astra can perform "weight-space programming"—directly reasoning about and editing neural network weights without gradient-based training. When tasked with improving Qwen3.5-0.8B's math performance, Astra edited just 0.016% of weights to boost accuracy from 7.9% to 48.1% by fixing thinking loops, a process that can be solved more efficiently using linear programming.