ML Pub Club #26: AlphaProof, RL for Math, Gemini's Gold Medals, and Beyond
At the first ML Pub Club of 2026, we’re diving straight into a major AI milestone: neural networks achieving medal-level performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) and the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) — reshaping what’s possible in machine reasoning. 🚀
You’ll get a technical deep dive into AlphaProof, a reinforcement learning–based system that operates within the Lean proof assistant to solve complex mathematical problems. We’ll show how modern AI systems combine learning, search, and formal verification to reach this level of rigor and performance.
We’re excited to welcome Goran Žužić, Research Scientist at Google Research Zürich, working at the intersection of Theoretical Computer Science and AI for Mathematics. Goran co-led the formalization workstream for AlphaProof, which achieved a Silver medal standard at the 2024 IMO—recognized by Quanta Magazine as a top breakthrough of the year. He subsequently contributed to the efforts that achieved Gold medal standards at the IMO 2025 and ICPC 2025.
Previously, he was a postdoctoral scholar at ETH Zürich. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, where his thesis on Universal Optimality in distributed networks won the 2021 ACM-EATCS Principles of Distributed Computing Doctoral Dissertation Award.
Join us as we explore the methodology behind AlphaProof, focusing on its neuro-symbolic architecture, that combines the explorative power of large language models with the rigorous verification of formal logic. Key components include autoformalization to bridge natural and formal languages, and the treatment of theorem proving as a game solved via AlphaZero-style search.
We'll close by discussing the broader implications of these technologies for research, mathematics and theoretical computer science, and finish with an overview of the latest AI systems that have recently achieved Gold medal standards in both mathematics and competitive programming.
🗓️ Tuesday I February 3rd, 2026
🕖 6PM
📍 CroAI HQ's
See you 👋
FYI if interested in Goran's publications, check them out here: