# Adam Zweiger

![Adam Zweiger](/resources/cognition/portraits/adam-zweiger.webp)

![Adam Zweiger 2](/resources/cognition/portraits/adam-zweiger.webp)
![Adam Zweiger 3](/resources/cognition/portraits/adam-zweiger.webp)

ML researcher at Thinking Machines Lab; ex-Cognition (SWE-1.6 RL); MIT CSAIL (SEAL, Attention Matching)  
Thinking Machines Lab  
San Francisco Bay Area

## At Cognition

- Role: Former Member of Technical Staff Intern (Engineering)
- Joined: Jan 2026
- How they joined: Directly
- Before Cognition: Undergraduate Researcher, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)
- Now: Thinking Machines Lab (https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-zweiger-1b2b80200)
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: Amazon; MIT (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-zweiger-1b2b80200
- X: @AdamZweiger
- GitHub: https://github.com/adamzweiger
- Website: https://adamzweiger.github.io/
- Domain: thinkingmachines.ai

## Notes
- Joined Thinking Machines Lab in June 2026 after graduating from MIT. Verbatim announcement (2026-07-17): "Excited to share that I recently joined @thinkymachines after graduating from @MIT. I have an inkling this will be the next great frontier lab, and a different kind of one. Proud to be working alongside such a fun and talented team." (https://x.com/AdamZweiger/status/2078224205779480683)
- Co-author of 'Introducing SWE 1.6: Improving Model UX' (2026-04-07); SWE-1.6 was post-trained from scratch to jointly optimize intelligence and 'model UX', runs up to 950 tok/s, and shipped generally available in Windsurf. (https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-6)
- Listed as a co-author of Cognition's 'An Early Preview of SWE-1.6 and Research Update' (2026-03-01), alongside Carlo Baronio, Ben Pan, Sam Lee, Eric Lu, Steven Cao, Rohan Choudhury, Ray Wang, Gary Chang and Silas Alberti; the post describes a refined RL recipe with two orders of magnitude more compute and SWE-1.6 scoring 11% higher than SWE-1.5 on SWE-Bench Pro. (https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-6-preview)
- Verbatim X post about Cognition (2026-03-01): "New coding model from @cognition! I helped train it during my internship there. The team is very strong and this is just the beginning!" (https://x.com/AdamZweiger/status/2028234796476825979)
- Lead author of 'Fast KV Compaction via Attention Matching' (ICML 2026) with Xinghong Fu, Han Guo and Yoon Kim; per his X post it 'achieves 50x compaction in seconds with little performance loss', with code at github.com/adamzweiger/compaction. (https://x.com/AdamZweiger/status/2024514902287626277)
- Spent Jan-Apr 2026 as a Member of Technical Staff at Cognition working on 'RL for coding models' (LinkedIn description); he describes it as an internship, so it overlapped his final MIT semester. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-zweiger-1b2b80200)
- Co-lead author (with Jyothish Pari) of 'Self-Adapting Language Models' (SEAL, NeurIPS 2025) with Han Guo, Ekin Akyurek, Yoon Kim and Pulkit Agrawal; SEAL has an LLM write its own finetuning data ('self-edits') and meta-learns that ability with RL. (https://news.mit.edu/2025/teaching-large-language-models-to-absorb-new-knowledge-1112)
- Undergraduate researcher at MIT CSAIL (Nov 2024 - Jan 2026), advised by Prof. Yoon Kim, working on data-efficient adaptation and long-context methods for language models. (https://adamzweiger.github.io/)
- Verbatim X post after leaving (2026-07-08): "@cognition congrats @ybenpan @carlobaronio and team!" - congratulating SWE-1.6 co-authors Ben Pan and Carlo Baronio. (https://x.com/AdamZweiger/status/2074888828259873140)
- Current X bio: 'Working on learning @thinkymachines | prev: @cognition @MIT_CSAIL'. (https://x.com/AdamZweiger)
- Cognition signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf, the agentic IDE, in July 2025 after Windsurf's CEO and others left for Google; Adam joined Cognition about six months later and worked on SWE-series models that ship inside Windsurf. He was not a Windsurf employee himself. (https://cognition.com/blog/windsurf)
- Co-first author of 'The Surprising Effectiveness of Test-Time Training for Few-Shot Learning' (ICML 2025) with Ekin Akyurek, Mehul Damani, Linlu Qiu, Han Guo, Jyothish Pari, Yoon Kim and Jacob Andreas; he maintains the companion repo adamzweiger/Fewshot-TTT alongside ekinakyurek/marc. (https://adamzweiger.github.io/)
- BS in Computer Science at MIT (2023-2027 per LinkedIn); he announced graduating in July 2026. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-zweiger-1b2b80200)
- Open source: personal repos include adamzweiger/compaction (Attention Matching) and adamzweiger/Fewshot-TTT; he co-authored Continual-Intelligence/SEAL, and his GitHub shows public repos and followers. (https://github.com/adamzweiger)
- SEAL was covered by WIRED ('This AI Model Never Stops Learning', 2025-06-18), which quotes Adam as an MIT undergraduate on the work. (https://www.wired.com/story/this-ai-model-never-stops-learning/)
- Received a USAMO Honorable Mention as a student of AlphaStar Academy, a Bay Area competition-math and programming training center; it lists him among USAMO HMs with Aaron Chen, Brian Li, Catherine Li, Jason Mao, Jerry Liu and others. (https://alphastar.academy/accolades/)
- Competitive programming: scored a perfect 1000 in the USACO 2021 US Open Gold division (listed as USA, graduation year 2023), which earns promotion to Platinum; he lists 'USACO Platinum Division' as an honor. (https://usaco.org/current/data/open21_gold_results.html)
- Argued that 'The biggest reduction in KV cache memory comes not from quantization or MLA, but from latent compaction, along the sequence dimension'. (https://x.com/AdamZweiger/status/2039067852901171530)
- Presented SEAL at NeurIPS 2025 (poster #3415) with @jyo_pari, @HanGuo97 and @akyurekekin. (https://x.com/AdamZweiger/status/1995628308009287861)
- Presented SEAL in a paper-reading session hosted by Arize with co-author Jyo Pari. (https://arize.com/blog/self-adapting-language-models-paper-authors-discuss-implications/)
- Software Engineer Intern at Amazon Web Services, Jun-Aug 2024, after his first year at MIT. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-zweiger-1b2b80200)
- Posts architecture breakdowns, for example a thread listing the gpt-oss architecture tricks (attention sinks, alternating sliding-window attention), which reads as a public-teaching habit around model internals. (https://x.com/AdamZweiger/status/1952799642636148917)
- Also scored 1000 in the USACO December 2019 Bronze contest, his entry point to USACO. (http://usaco.org/current/data/dec19_bronze_results.html)

## Experience
- Member of Technical Staff at Thinking Machines Lab (Jun 2026 - Present)
- Member of Technical Staff at Cognition (Jan 2026 - Apr 2026): RL for coding models
- Undergraduate Researcher at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) (Nov 2024 - Jan 2026): https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=MRk2E8AAAAAJ
- Software Engineer Intern at Amazon Web Services (AWS) (Jun 2024 - Aug 2024)

## Education
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science - (Jan 2023 - Jan 2027)

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-zweiger-1b2b80200
- https://x.com/AdamZweiger
- https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-6
- https://adamzweiger.github.io/
- https://github.com/adamzweiger
- https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-6-preview
- https://www.wired.com/story/this-ai-model-never-stops-learning/
- https://news.mit.edu/2025/teaching-large-language-models-to-absorb-new-knowledge-1112
- https://usaco.org/current/data/open21_gold_results.html
- https://alphastar.academy/accolades/
- https://www.aapt.org/physicsteam/2022/upload/2022-USAPhO-Qualifiers.pdf
- https://cognition.com/blog/windsurf
- https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/08/cognition-valued-at-10point2-billion-two-months-after-windsurf-.html
- https://arize.com/blog/self-adapting-language-models-paper-authors-discuss-implications/
- http://usaco.org/current/data/dec19_bronze_results.html
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/thinkingmachinesai
- https://x.com/AdamZweiger/status/2078224205779480683
- https://x.com/AdamZweiger/status/2028234796476825979
- https://x.com/AdamZweiger/status/2024514902287626277
- https://x.com/AdamZweiger/status/2074888828259873140
- https://x.com/AdamZweiger/status/2039067852901171530
- https://x.com/AdamZweiger/status/1995628308009287861
- https://x.com/AdamZweiger/status/1952799642636148917


Researched with Autumn (https://www.autumn.ai) from public sources. Updated 2026-11-04. Profile: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people/adam-zweiger · Everyone at Cognition: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people