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Oct 30

The Unfireable Safety Kernel: Execution-Time AI Alignment for AI Agents and Other Escapable AI Systems

AI agents are granted access to tools, APIs, and other infrastructure, making them active principals in those systems. The dominant approach places controls inside the agent's own runtime: system prompts, output filters, and guardrail libraries. Any control in the agent's address space is reachable by inputs that influence it; this generalizes to any AI system with sufficient reach into its own runtime, a class we term escapable AI systems. We identify four properties that an authorization mechanism must satisfy for architectural control rather than for cooperative requests: process separation, pre-action enforcement on a structurally only path, fail-closed at both the request and system levels, and externalized signed evidence verifiable outside the controlled system's trust boundary. We position this layer as execution-time AI alignment, complementing training-time alignment (RLHF, Constitutional AI) and inference-time alignment. We present the Unfireable Safety Kernel, a Rust reference implementation realizing all four. Its fail-closed invariant is machine-checked at two levels: an SMT theorem (Z3) and an exhaustive bounded-model-checking proof of the production decision function (Kani, 4/4 harnesses). A Python-to-Rust migration was gated on byte-equivalence (1000/1000 fixtures; 17/17 adversarial classes). We evaluate the kernel governing a live, escapable AI system, a deterministic, self-improving world model, against an escape-seeking adversary driving its real self-modification seam: across 1,000 self-modifications, all 704 attempts on the safety-critical core are refused, with no escape; a further 300, under the operator kill switch, are also refused. A separate campaign of 6,240 authorization round-trips had no successful bypass. Against 3 contemporary systems claiming the agent control plane, the agent invokes control; here, it lacks that choice.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 23

Enhancing Neural Theorem Proving through Data Augmentation and Dynamic Sampling Method

Theorem proving is a fundamental task in mathematics. With the advent of large language models (LLMs) and interactive theorem provers (ITPs) like Lean, there has been growing interest in integrating LLMs and ITPs to automate theorem proving. In this approach, the LLM generates proof steps (tactics), and the ITP checks the applicability of the tactics at the current goal. The two systems work together to complete the proof. In this paper, we introduce DS-Prover, a novel dynamic sampling method for theorem proving. This method dynamically determines the number of tactics to apply to expand the current goal, taking into account the remaining time compared to the total allocated time for proving a theorem. This makes the proof search process more efficient by adjusting the balance between exploration and exploitation as time passes. We also augment the training dataset by decomposing simplification and rewrite tactics with multiple premises into tactics with single premises. This gives the model more examples to learn from and helps it to predict the tactics with premises more accurately. We perform our experiments using the Mathlib dataset of the Lean theorem prover and report the performance on two standard datasets, MiniF2F and ProofNet. Our methods achieve significant performance gains on both datasets. We achieved a state-of-the-art performance (Pass@1) of 14.2% on the ProofNet dataset and a performance of 29.8% on MiniF2F, slightly surpassing the best-reported Pass@1 of 29.6% using Lean.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 20, 2023

Towards Automated Formal Verification of Backend Systems with LLMs

Software testing plays a critical role in ensuring that systems behave as intended. However, existing automated testing approaches struggle to match the capabilities of human engineers due to key limitations such as test locality, lack of general reliability, and business logic blindness. In this work, we propose a novel framework that leverages functional programming and type systems to translate Scala backend code into formal Lean representations. Our pipeline automatically generates theorems that specify the intended behavior of APIs and database operations, and uses LLM-based provers to verify them. When a theorem is proved, the corresponding logic is guaranteed to be correct and no further testing is needed. If the negation of a theorem is proved instead, it confirms a bug. In cases where neither can be proved, human intervention is required. We evaluate our method on realistic backend systems and find that it can formally verify over 50% of the test requirements, which suggests that half of a testing engineer's workload can be automated. Additionally, with an average cost of only $2.19 per API, LLM-based verification is significantly more cost-effective than manual testing and can be scaled easily through parallel execution. Our results indicate a promising direction for scalable, AI-powered software testing, with the potential to greatly improve engineering productivity as models continue to advance.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 13, 2025

The Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing, Formalized in Lean 4

The Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing states that a market is free of arbitrage exactly when it admits an equivalent martingale measure. We formalize it in Lean 4 over Mathlib in three settings: a finite-state market over a finite horizon (Harrison-Pliska), a one-period market on an arbitrary probability space with a single scalar return (Follmer-Schied), and a one-period market with finitely many assets. The finite case is the geometry of a separating hyperplane; the scalar one-period case is an elementary change of measure. In the d-asset case the equivalent martingale measure is constructed explicitly, as the minimiser of the smooth convex potential E[log(1+e^{langleθ,Yrangle})]: absence of arbitrage is precisely coercivity of the potential, its first-order condition is the martingale property, and the minimiser's logistic weight is the density of the measure. The construction uses no Hahn-Banach theorem, no L^0-closedness argument, no measurable selection, and no non-redundancy hypothesis. To our knowledge this is the first machine-checked Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing in any proof assistant. The boundary is explicit: the general multi-period Dalang-Morton-Willinger theorem lies outside the development. Every theorem is sorry-free, each headline result's axioms are pinned to Mathlib's classical defaults by a build-enforced gate, and the whole is reproducible from a pinned toolchain.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 26

MA-ProofBench: A Two-Tiered Evaluation of LLMs for Theorem Proving in Mathematical Analysis

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made notable progress in automated theorem proving, yet existing formal benchmarks remain limited in both mathematical coverage and difficulty. Most are concentrated in areas that are easier to formalize, such as algebra and elementary number theory, and provide limited coverage of subfields that require deeper reasoning, including mathematical analysis. To address this gap, we introduce MA-ProofBench, to the best of our knowledge, the first formal theorem-proving benchmark dedicated to Mathematical Analysis. The benchmark contains 200 formalized theorems covering 6 core topics and 27 subcategories, including measure and integration theory, complex analysis, and functional analysis. The problems are divided into two difficulty levels, an undergraduate level (Level I, 100 problems) and a Ph.D. qualifying level (Level II, 100 problems), to evaluate how well LLMs perform formal reasoning at different mathematical depths. Each problem is constructed through a human-led, LLM-assisted formalization pipeline followed by independent expert review, ensuring that the formal statements remain faithful to the original mathematics. We evaluate a range of recent general-purpose reasoning models and formal theorem provers on MA-ProofBench. However, most models perform poorly: even the best-performing model, GPT-5.5, achieves only 16% Pass@8 on Level I and 5% on Level II, while most models stay close to 0% on Level II. Further analysis identifies Mathlib hallucinations and incomplete proofs as the two dominant failure modes, while an evaluation on the natural-language version of the benchmark exposes a clear gap between informal and formal reasoning. MA-ProofBench is intended to serve as a reliable reference for tracking progress in formal mathematical reasoning in advanced domains.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 10

Neurosymbolic Auditing of Natural-Language Software Requirements

Natural-language software requirements are often ambiguous, inconsistent, and underspecified; in safety-critical domains, these defects propagate into formal models that verify the wrong specification and into implementations that ship unsafe behavior. We show that large language models, equipped with an SMT solver, can audit such requirements: translating them into formal logic, detecting ambiguity through stochastic variation in the generated formalization, and exposing inconsistency, vacuousness, and safety violations through solver queries on the resulting specification. We present VERIMED, a neurosymbolic pipeline that operationalizes this idea for medical-device software requirements, and report two findings. First, stochastic variation across independent formalizations is a signal of ambiguity: requirements that admit multiple plausible interpretations produce SMT-inequivalent formalizations, and bidirectional SMT equivalence checking turns this disagreement into a solver-checkable test. Second, the usefulness of symbolic feedback depends on its granularity: in counterexample-guided repair on a hemodialysis question-answering benchmark, concrete SMT counterexamples raise verified accuracy from 55.4% to 98.5%. Over an extensive experimental evaluation on open-source hemodialysis safety requirements, we show that the LLM-based approach in VERIMED successfully reduces ambiguity-sensitive requirements and enables rigorous auditing of software requirements through SMT-based queries.

  • 2 authors
·
May 12

Towards Neural Synthesis for SMT-Assisted Proof-Oriented Programming

Proof-oriented programs mix computational content with proofs of program correctness. However, the human effort involved in programming and proving is still substantial, despite the use of Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers to automate proofs in languages such as F*. Seeking to spur research on using AI to automate the construction of proof-oriented programs, we curate a dataset of 600K lines of open-source F* programs and proofs, including software used in production systems ranging from Windows and Linux, to Python and Firefox. Our dataset includes around 32K top-level F* definitions, each representing a type-directed program and proof synthesis problem -- producing a definition given a formal specification expressed as an F* type. We provide a program-fragment checker that queries F* to check the correctness of candidate solutions. We believe this is the largest corpus of SMT-assisted program proofs coupled with a reproducible program-fragment checker. Grounded in this dataset, we investigate the use of AI to synthesize programs and their proofs in F*, with promising results. Our main finding in that the performance of fine-tuned smaller language models (such as Phi-2 or StarCoder) compare favorably with large language models (such as GPT-4), at a much lower computational cost. We also identify various type-based retrieval augmentation techniques and find that they boost performance significantly. With detailed error analysis and case studies, we identify potential strengths and weaknesses of models and techniques and suggest directions for future improvements.

  • 7 authors
·
May 2, 2024

Lean Meets Theoretical Computer Science: Scalable Synthesis of Theorem Proving Challenges in Formal-Informal Pairs

Formal theorem proving (FTP) has emerged as a critical foundation for evaluating the reasoning capabilities of large language models, enabling automated verification of mathematical proofs at scale. However, progress has been constrained by limited datasets due to the high cost of manual curation and the scarcity of challenging problems with verified formal-informal correspondences. We propose leveraging theoretical computer science (TCS) as a scalable source of rigorous proof problems, where algorithmic definitions enable automated generation of arbitrarily many challenging theorem-proof pairs. We demonstrate this approach on two TCS domains: Busy Beaver problems, which involve proving bounds on Turing machine halting behavior, and Mixed Boolean Arithmetic problems, which combine logical and arithmetic reasoning. Our framework automatically synthesizes problems with parallel formal (Lean4) and informal (Markdown) specifications, creating a scalable pipeline for generating verified proof challenges. Evaluation on frontier models reveals substantial gaps in automated theorem proving: while DeepSeekProver-V2-671B achieves 57.5\% success on Busy Beaver problems, it manages only 12\% on Mixed Boolean Arithmetic problems. These results highlight the difficulty of long-form proof generation even for problems that are computationally easy to verify, demonstrating the value of TCS domains for advancing automated reasoning research.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 21, 2025

APOLLO: Automated LLM and Lean Collaboration for Advanced Formal Reasoning

Formal reasoning and automated theorem proving constitute a challenging subfield of machine learning, in which machines are tasked with proving mathematical theorems using formal languages like Lean. A formal verification system can check whether a formal proof is correct or not almost instantaneously, but generating a completely correct formal proof with large language models (LLMs) remains a formidable task. The usual approach in the literature is to prompt the LLM many times (up to several thousands) until one of the generated proofs passes the verification system. In this work, we present APOLLO (Automated PrOof repair via LLM and Lean cOllaboration), a modular, model-agnostic pipeline that combines the strengths of the Lean compiler with an LLM's reasoning abilities to achieve better proof-generation results at a low sampling budget. Apollo directs a fully automated process in which the LLM generates proofs for theorems, a set of agents analyze the proofs, fix the syntax errors, identify the mistakes in the proofs using Lean, isolate failing sub-lemmas, utilize automated solvers, and invoke an LLM on each remaining goal with a low top-K budget. The repaired sub-proofs are recombined and reverified, iterating up to a user-controlled maximum number of attempts. On the miniF2F benchmark, we establish a new state-of-the-art accuracy of 75.0% among 7B-parameter models while keeping the sampling budget below one thousand. Moreover, Apollo raises the state-of-the-art accuracy for Goedel-Prover-SFT to 65.6% while cutting sample complexity from 25,600 to a few hundred. General-purpose models (o3-mini, o4-mini) jump from 3-7% to over 40% accuracy. Our results demonstrate that targeted, compiler-guided repair of LLM outputs yields dramatic gains in both efficiency and correctness, suggesting a general paradigm for scalable automated theorem proving.

  • 3 authors
·
May 8, 2025

Alchemy: Amplifying Theorem-Proving Capability through Symbolic Mutation

Formal proofs are challenging to write even for experienced experts. Recent progress in Neural Theorem Proving (NTP) shows promise in expediting this process. However, the formal corpora available on the Internet are limited compared to the general text, posing a significant data scarcity challenge for NTP. To address this issue, this work proposes Alchemy, a general framework for data synthesis that constructs formal theorems through symbolic mutation. Specifically, for each candidate theorem in Mathlib, we identify all invocable theorems that can be used to rewrite or apply to it. Subsequently, we mutate the candidate theorem by replacing the corresponding term in the statement with its equivalent form or antecedent. As a result, our method increases the number of theorems in Mathlib by an order of magnitude, from 110k to 6M. Furthermore, we perform continual pretraining and supervised finetuning on this augmented corpus for large language models. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving a 5% absolute performance improvement on Leandojo benchmark. Additionally, our synthetic data achieve a 2.5% absolute performance gain on the out-of-distribution miniF2F benchmark. To provide further insights, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of synthetic data composition and the training paradigm, offering valuable guidance for developing a strong theorem prover.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 21, 2024 3

Neural Theorem Proving: Generating and Structuring Proofs for Formal Verification

Formally verifying properties of software code has been a highly desirable task, especially with the emergence of LLM-generated code. In the same vein, they provide an interesting avenue for the exploration of formal verification and mechanistic interpretability. Since the introduction of code-specific models, despite their successes in generating code in Lean4 and Isabelle, the task of generalized theorem proving still remains far from being fully solved and will be a benchmark for reasoning capability in LLMs. In this work, we introduce a framework that generates whole proofs in a formal language to be used within systems that utilize the power of built-in tactics and off-the-shelf automated theorem provers. Our framework includes 3 components: generating natural language statements of the code to be verified, an LLM that generates formal proofs for the given statement, and a module employing heuristics for building the final proof. To train the LLM, we employ a 2-stage fine-tuning process, where we first use SFT-based training to enable the model to generate syntactically correct Isabelle code and then RL-based training that encourages the model to generate proofs verified by a theorem prover. We validate our framework using the miniF2F-test benchmark and the Isabelle proof assistant and design a use case to verify the correctness of the AWS S3 bucket access policy code. We also curate a dataset based on the FVEL\textnormal{ER} dataset for future training tasks.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 23, 2025

TheoremLlama: Transforming General-Purpose LLMs into Lean4 Experts

Proving mathematical theorems using computer-verifiable formal languages like Lean significantly impacts mathematical reasoning. One approach to formal theorem proving involves generating complete proofs using Large Language Models (LLMs) based on Natural Language (NL) proofs. Similar methods have shown promising results in code generation. However, most modern LLMs exhibit suboptimal performance due to the scarcity of aligned NL and Formal Language (FL) theorem-proving data. This scarcity results in a paucity of methodologies for training LLMs and techniques to fully utilize their capabilities in composing formal proofs. To address the challenges, this paper proposes **TheoremLlama**, an end-to-end framework to train a general-purpose LLM to become a Lean4 expert. This framework encompasses NL-FL aligned dataset generation methods, training approaches for the LLM formal theorem prover, and techniques for LLM Lean4 proof writing. Using the dataset generation method, we provide *Open Bootstrapped Theorems* (OBT), an NL-FL aligned and bootstrapped dataset. A key innovation in this framework is the NL-FL bootstrapping method, where NL proofs are integrated into Lean4 code for training datasets, leveraging the NL reasoning ability of LLMs for formal reasoning. The **TheoremLlama** framework achieves cumulative accuracies of 36.48% and 33.61% on MiniF2F-Valid and Test datasets respectively, surpassing the GPT-4 baseline of 22.95% and 25.41%. We have also open-sourced our model checkpoints and generated dataset, and will soon make all the code publicly available.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 3, 2024 1

Learning to Discover Interesting Mathematics

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly able to solve advanced mathematical problems, including many that have been open for decades. This opens the door to expansion of mathematical knowledge at unprecedented scale. Yet, while LLMs may be able to conjecture and prove more and more theorems, it remains open whether this new mathematical knowledge is interesting or useful. We define intrinsic interestingness of a theorem as the ratio between the length of its proof and the length of its statement. We show that this correlates strongly with an extrinsic measure of the downstream utility of a theorem. We identify the difficulty of a proof conditioned on a set of premises as a useful primitive for computing these metrics, and train a 27B model that predicts proof difficulty more accurately than frontier general-purpose models. Optimizing for our metric creates a model capable of producing more interesting theorems, while also reducing substantial or full overlap with Mathlib from 91.9% to 30.6%, showcasing the creation of more out-of-distribution math. We show that our system can generate candidate theorems, select the most interesting among them, and iteratively build on a self-expanding mathematical library. These metrics provide a practical and quantifiable signal for ranking conjectures and guiding proof search within formal mathematical libraries. Our framework provides a path towards self-expanding, machine-verified mathematical libraries that can choose worthwhile statements without relying on human-supplied targets.

Why Agentic Theorem Prover Works: A Statistical Provability Theory of Mathematical Reasoning Models

Agentic theorem provers combine a reasoning model, retrieval, search, and a proof assistant verifier, yet it remains unclear which components actually improve finite-budget proof success and why they help on real mathematical workloads. We study this question through statistical provability: the probability of reaching a verified proof within a budget on a specified stream of theorem instances. We model formal proof search as a finite-horizon reachability MDP with deterministic verifier dynamics, and show that under a faithful state abstraction the optimal success probability coincides with ordinary syntactic provability. We then analyze a simple but practically important pipeline: depth-wise offline action-value regression followed by greedy test-time proving. Our main theorem bounds the provability gap between the learned prover and the optimal prover by an occupancy-weighted sum of uniform action-value errors; in the common uniform-error reading, the leading complexity multiplier is the learned prover's average truncated proof length. The error decomposes into approximation error, geometric coverage of the training distribution, and Monte Carlo label noise, and improves to a fast rate under an action-gap margin condition. The result gives a component-sensitive account of why verifier feedback, retrieval, representation geometry, and proof-shortening mechanisms help on biased theorem workloads, without contradicting classical worst-case hardness.

  • 3 authors
·
May 21

LLM-Guided Quantified SMT Solving over Uninterpreted Functions

Quantified formulas with Uninterpreted Functions (UFs) over non-linear real arithmetic pose fundamental challenges for Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solving. Traditional quantifier instantiation methods struggle because they lack semantic understanding of UF constraints, forcing them to search through unbounded solution spaces with limited guidance. We present AquaForte, a framework that leverages Large Language Models to provide semantic guidance for UF instantiation by generating instantiated candidates for function definitions that satisfy the constraints, thereby significantly reducing the search space and complexity for solvers. Our approach preprocesses formulas through constraint separation, uses structured prompts to extract mathematical reasoning from LLMs, and integrates the results with traditional SMT algorithms through adaptive instantiation. AquaForte maintains soundness through systematic validation: LLM-guided instantiations yielding SAT solve the original problem, while UNSAT results generate exclusion clauses for iterative refinement. Completeness is preserved by fallback to traditional solvers augmented with learned constraints. Experimental evaluation on SMT-COMP benchmarks demonstrates that AquaForte solves numerous instances where state-of-the-art solvers like Z3 and CVC5 timeout, with particular effectiveness on satisfiable formulas. Our work shows that LLMs can provide valuable mathematical intuition for symbolic reasoning, establishing a new paradigm for SMT constraint solving.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 8

LeanDojo: Theorem Proving with Retrieval-Augmented Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in proving formal theorems using proof assistants such as Lean. However, existing methods are difficult to reproduce or build on, due to private code, data, and large compute requirements. This has created substantial barriers to research on machine learning methods for theorem proving. This paper removes these barriers by introducing LeanDojo: an open-source Lean playground consisting of toolkits, data, models, and benchmarks. LeanDojo extracts data from Lean and enables interaction with the proof environment programmatically. It contains fine-grained annotations of premises in proofs, providing valuable data for premise selection: a key bottleneck in theorem proving. Using this data, we develop ReProver (Retrieval-Augmented Prover): the first LLM-based prover that is augmented with retrieval for selecting premises from a vast math library. It is inexpensive and needs only one GPU week of training. Our retriever leverages LeanDojo's program analysis capability to identify accessible premises and hard negative examples, which makes retrieval much more effective. Furthermore, we construct a new benchmark consisting of 96,962 theorems and proofs extracted from Lean's math library. It features challenging data split requiring the prover to generalize to theorems relying on novel premises that are never used in training. We use this benchmark for training and evaluation, and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ReProver over non-retrieval baselines and GPT-4. We thus provide the first set of open-source LLM-based theorem provers without any proprietary datasets and release it under a permissive MIT license to facilitate further research.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 27, 2023

DeepTheorem: Advancing LLM Reasoning for Theorem Proving Through Natural Language and Reinforcement Learning

Theorem proving serves as a major testbed for evaluating complex reasoning abilities in large language models (LLMs). However, traditional automated theorem proving (ATP) approaches rely heavily on formal proof systems that poorly align with LLMs' strength derived from informal, natural language knowledge acquired during pre-training. In this work, we propose DeepTheorem, a comprehensive informal theorem-proving framework exploiting natural language to enhance LLM mathematical reasoning. DeepTheorem includes a large-scale benchmark dataset consisting of 121K high-quality IMO-level informal theorems and proofs spanning diverse mathematical domains, rigorously annotated for correctness, difficulty, and topic categories, accompanied by systematically constructed verifiable theorem variants. We devise a novel reinforcement learning strategy (RL-Zero) explicitly tailored to informal theorem proving, leveraging the verified theorem variants to incentivize robust mathematical inference. Additionally, we propose comprehensive outcome and process evaluation metrics examining proof correctness and the quality of reasoning steps. Extensive experimental analyses demonstrate DeepTheorem significantly improves LLM theorem-proving performance compared to existing datasets and supervised fine-tuning protocols, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy and reasoning quality. Our findings highlight DeepTheorem's potential to fundamentally advance automated informal theorem proving and mathematical exploration.

  • 13 authors
·
May 29, 2025 2

Machine-Checked Computational Group Theory in Lean 4: Operational Schreier-Sims Stabilizer Chains, BSGS Sifting, and Backtrack Ordered Partitions

We present gap-lean4-port (Release v0.2.0), a machine-checked formalization of foundational algorithms in computational discrete algebra and permutation group theory within the Lean 4 interactive theorem prover and Mathlib4. While modern proof assistants feature extensive abstract algebraic hierarchies, constructive and operational permutation group algorithms, such as Charles Sims' 1970 Schreier-Sims algorithm, transversal tree lookups, and backtrack ordered partition refinement, have remained largely unformalized in dependent type theory. Here, we formalize the operational algorithmic core of the Groups, Algorithms, Programming (GAP) system library across four foundational modules, proving 35 machine-checked theorems with zero unproven conjectures (sorry) and zero custom axioms under standard Lean 4 foundations (propext, Classical.choice, Quot.sound). We machine-check: (1) Schreier-Sims stabilizer chain hierarchies (StabLevel, StabChain) and the invariance of incremental transversal tree extensions (extendSchreierPoint_invariant); (2) single-level and multi-level Schreier sifting reductions (siftOneLevel, siftFull), proving that full sifting strictly fixes all base points (siftFull_fixes_all_basePoints); (3) constructive soundness and completeness of Base and Strong Generating Set (BSGS) membership testing (membershipTestKnownBase_iff_mem); (4) backtrack ordered partition cell refinement (splitCellByPred), proving mutual cell disjointness, union conservation, and exact cardinality preservation; (5) cyclotomic extension rings Z/nZ(eps_m) and machine-check GAP's exact size theorem |Z/nZ(eps_m)| = n^m; and (6) executable Bezout inverses via Extended Euclidean GCD (Nat.gcdA) over residue rings Z/nZ. The entire codebase compiles deterministically under 'lake build RequestProject' and is openly available at https://github.com/pCwOrM/gap-lean4-port.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 28

Rethinking Fine-Tuning when Scaling Test-Time Compute: Limiting Confidence Improves Mathematical Reasoning

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) highlights the power of scaling test-time compute to achieve strong performance on complex tasks, such as mathematical reasoning and code generation. This raises a critical question: how should model training be modified to optimize performance under a subsequent test-time compute strategy and budget? To explore this, we focus on pass@N, a simple test-time strategy that searches for a correct answer in N independent samples. We show, surprisingly, that training with cross-entropy (CE) loss can be {it misaligned} with pass@N in that pass@N accuracy {it decreases} with longer training. We explain the origins of this misalignment in terms of model overconfidence induced by CE, and experimentally verify our prediction of overconfidence as an impediment to scaling test-time compute via pass@N. Furthermore we suggest a principled, modified training loss that is better aligned to pass@N by limiting model confidence and rescuing pass@N test performance. Our algorithm demonstrates improved mathematical reasoning on MATH and MiniF2F benchmarks under several scenarios: (1) providing answers to math questions; and (2) proving theorems by searching over proof trees of varying shapes. Overall our work underscores the importance of co-designing two traditionally separate phases of LLM development: training-time protocols and test-time search and reasoning strategies.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 10, 2025

Pythagoras-Prover: Advancing Efficient Formal Proving via Augmented Lean Formalisation

Modern Lean theorem provers achieve strong performance only with substantial training and inference compute, driven in part by scarce verified proof data and the long reasoning traces of formal proof search, making both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and sampling expensive. We introduce Pythagoras-Prover, a compute-efficient open-source family of Lean theorem provers built for practical compute budgets. The family spans two generation paradigms: autoregressive models at 4B and 32B parameters, and a first proof-of-concept diffusion-based prover (4B) that iteratively refines Lean proofs at inference time. For training efficiency, we build a Lean-verified corpus stratified into easy, medium, and hard problems for curriculum SFT, so models acquire proof skills progressively from shorter, simpler proofs to longer, harder ones. During SFT, a dynamic proof-reasoning filtering scheme preserves informative proof traces while keeping each instance within an 8k-token context budget. We also introduce Augmented Lean Formalisation (ALF), which expands scarce verified corpora into variants of formal statements, populated via self-distillation for extra training signal without formally verifying every mutated instance. By perturbing known problems while preserving their formal character, ALF reduces reliance on any statement's surface form. Empirically, Pythagoras-Prover-4B surpasses DeepSeek-Prover-V2-671B at pass@32 on MiniF2F-Test (86.1% vs 82.4%) with ~167x fewer parameters, while Pythagoras-Prover-32B sets the open-source state of the art at 93.0% on MiniF2F-Test and solves 93 of 672 PutnamBench problems. We release MiniF2F-ALF, an ALF-mutated contamination-sensitive benchmark on which every evaluated model loses accuracy; here our 32B remains strongest and our 4B matches the prior state of the art, Goedel-Prover-V2-32B.

OptProver: Bridging Olympiad and Optimization through Continual Training in Formal Theorem Proving

Recent advances in formal theorem proving have focused on Olympiad-level mathematics, leaving undergraduate domains largely unexplored. Optimization, fundamental to machine learning, operations research, and scientific computing, remains underserved by existing provers. Its reliance on domain-specific formalisms (convexity, optimality conditions, and algorithmic analysis) creates significant distribution shift, making naive domain transfer ineffective. We present OptProver, a trained model that achieves robust transfer from Olympiad to undergraduate optimization. Starting from a strong Olympiad-level prover, our pipeline mitigates distribution shift through two key innovations. First, we employ large-scale optimization-focused data curation via expert iteration. Second, we introduce a specialized preference learning objective that integrates perplexity-weighted optimization with a mechanism to penalize valid but non-progressing proof steps. This not only addresses distribution shifts but also guides the search toward efficient trajectories. To enable rigorous evaluation, we construct a novel benchmark in Lean 4 focused on optimization. On this benchmark, OptProver achieves state-of-the-art Pass@1 and Pass@32 among comparably sized models while maintaining competitive performance on general theorem-proving tasks, demonstrating effective domain transfer without catastrophic forgetting.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 27

HybridProver: Augmenting Theorem Proving with LLM-Driven Proof Synthesis and Refinement

Formal methods is pivotal for verifying the reliability of critical systems through rigorous mathematical proofs. However, its adoption is hindered by labor-intensive manual proofs and the expertise required to use theorem provers. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for automated theorem proving. Two promising approaches are generating tactics step by step and generating a whole proof directly with an LLM. However, existing work makes no attempt to combine the two approaches. In this work, we introduce HybridProver, a dual-model proof synthesis framework that combines tactic-based generation and whole-proof synthesis to harness the benefits of both approaches. HybridProver generates whole proof candidates for evaluation directly, then extracts proof sketches from those candidates. It then uses a tactic-based generation model that integrates automated tools to complete the sketches via stepwise refinement. We implement HybridProver for the Isabelle theorem prover and fine-tune LLMs on our optimized Isabelle datasets. Evaluation on the miniF2F dataset illustrates HybridProver's effectiveness. We achieve a 59.4% success rate on miniF2F, where the previous SOTA is 56.1%. Our ablation studies show that this SOTA result is attributable to combining whole-proof and tactic-based generation. Additionally, we show how the dataset quality, training parameters, and sampling diversity affect the final result during automated theorem proving with LLMs. All of our code, datasets, and LLMs are open source.

  • 4 authors
·
May 21, 2025

Yet another argument in favour of NP=CoNP

This article shows yet another proof of NP=CoNP$. In a previous article, we proved that NP=PSPACE and from it we can conclude that NP=CoNP immediately. The former proof shows how to obtain polynomial and, polynomial in time checkable Dag-like proofs for all purely implicational Minimal logic tautologies. From the fact that Minimal implicational logic is PSPACE-complete we get the proof that NP=PSPACE. This first proof of NP=CoNP uses Hudelmaier linear upper-bound on the height of Sequent Calculus minimal implicational logic proofs. In an addendum to the proof of NP=PSPACE, we observe that we do not need to use Hudelmaier upper-bound since any proof of non-hamiltonicity for any graph is linear upper-bounded. By the CoNP-completeness of non-hamiltonicity, we obtain NP=CoNP as a corollary of the first proof. In this article we show the third proof of CoNP=NP, also providing polynomial size and polynomial verifiable certificates that are Dags. They are generated from normal Natural Deduction proofs, linear height upper-bounded too, by removing redundancy, i.e., repeated parts. The existence of repeated parts is a consequence of the redundancy theorem for a family of super-polynomial proofs in the purely implicational Minimal logic. It is mandatory to read at least two previous articles to get the details of the proof presented here. The article that proves the redundancy theorem and the article that shows how to remove the repeated parts of a normal Natural Deduction proof to have a polynomial Dag certificate for minimal implicational logic tautologies.

  • 1 authors
·
Dec 28, 2020

STP: Self-play LLM Theorem Provers with Iterative Conjecturing and Proving

A fundamental challenge in formal theorem proving by LLMs is the lack of high-quality training data. Although reinforcement learning or expert iteration partially mitigates this issue by alternating between LLM generating proofs and finetuning them on correctly generated ones, performance quickly plateaus due to the scarcity of correct proofs (sparse rewards). To keep improving the models with limited data, we draw inspiration from mathematicians, who continuously develop new results, partly by proposing novel conjectures or exercises (which are often variants of known results) and attempting to solve them. We design the Self-play Theorem Prover (STP) that simultaneously takes on two roles, conjecturer and prover, each providing training signals to the other. The conjecturer is trained iteratively on previously generated conjectures that are barely provable by the current prover, which incentivizes it to generate increasingly challenging conjectures over time. The prover attempts to prove the conjectures with standard expert iteration. We evaluate STP with both Lean and Isabelle formal versifiers. With 19.8 billion tokens generated during the training in Lean, STP proves 26.3% of the statements in the LeanWorkbook dataset, doubling the previous best result of 13.2% achieved through expert iteration. The final model achieves state-of-the-art performance among whole-proof generation methods on miniF2F-test (61.7%, pass@3200), Proofnet-test (23.1%, pass@3200) and PutnamBench (8/644, pass@3200).

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 31, 2025

LeanSearch v2: Global Premise Retrieval for Lean 4 Theorem Proving

Proving theorems in Lean 4 often requires identifying a scattered set of library lemmas whose joint use enables a concise proof -- a task we call global premise retrieval. Existing tools address adjacent problems: semantic search engines find individual declarations matching a query, while premise-selection systems predict useful lemmas one tactic step at a time. Neither recovers the full premise set an entire theorem requires. We present LeanSearch v2, a two-mode retrieval system for this task. Its standard mode applies a hierarchy-informalized Mathlib corpus with an embedding-reranker pipeline, achieving state-of-the-art single-query retrieval without domain-specific fine-tuning (nDCG@10 of 0.62 vs. 0.53 for the next-best system). Its reasoning mode builds on standard mode as its retrieval substrate, targeting global premise retrieval through iterative sketch-retrieve-reflect cycles. On a 69-query benchmark of research-level Mathlib theorems, reasoning mode recovers 46.1% of ground-truth premise groups within 10 retrieved candidates, outperforming strong reasoning retrieval systems (38.0%) and premise-selection baselines (9.3%) on the same benchmark. In a controlled downstream evaluation with a fixed prover loop, replacing alternative retrievers with LeanSearch v2 yields the highest proof success (20% vs. 16% for the next-best system and 4% without retrieval), confirming that retrieval quality propagates to proof generation. We have open-sourced all code, data, and benchmarks. Code and data: https://github.com/frenzymath/LeanSearch-v2 . The standard mode is publicly available with API access at https://leansearch.net/ .

  • 8 authors
·
May 13

MPS-Prover: Advancing Stepwise Theorem Proving by Multi-Perspective Search and Data Curation

Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) in formal languages remains a formidable challenge in AI, demanding rigorous logical deduction and navigating vast search spaces. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promising performance, existing stepwise provers often suffer from biased search guidance, leading to inefficiencies and suboptimal proof strategies. This paper introduces the Multi-Perspective Search Prover (MPS-Prover), a novel stepwise ATP system designed to overcome these limitations. MPS-Prover incorporates two key innovations: a highly effective post-training data curation strategy that prunes approximately 40% of redundant training data without sacrificing performance, and a multi-perspective tree search mechanism. This search integrates a learned critic model with strategically designed heuristic rules to diversify tactic selection, prevent getting trapped in unproductive states, and enhance search robustness. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that MPS-Prover achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple challenging benchmarks, including miniF2F and ProofNet, outperforming prior 7B parameter models. Furthermore, our analyses reveal that MPS-Prover generates significantly shorter and more diverse proofs compared to existing stepwise and whole-proof methods, highlighting its efficiency and efficacy. Our work advances the capabilities of LLM-based formal reasoning and offers a robust framework and a comprehensive analysis for developing more powerful theorem provers.

  • 7 authors
·
May 16, 2025 2

PhysProver: Advancing Automatic Theorem Proving for Physics

The combination of verifiable languages and LLMs has significantly influenced both the mathematical and computer science communities because it provides a rigorous foundation for theorem proving. Recent advancements in the field provide foundation models and sophisticated agentic systems pushing the boundaries of formal mathematical reasoning to approach the natural language capability of LLMs. However, little attention has been given to the formal physics reasoning, which also heavily relies on similar problem-solving and theorem-proving frameworks. To solve this problem, this paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first approach to enhance formal theorem proving in the physics domain. We compose a dedicated dataset PhysLeanData for the task. It is composed of theorems sampled from PhysLean and data generated by a conjecture-based formal data generation pipeline. In the training pipeline, we leverage DeepSeek-Prover-V2-7B, a strong open-source mathematical theorem prover, and apply Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to train our model PhysProver. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that, using only sim5K training samples, PhysProver achieves an overall 2.4\% improvement in multiple sub-domains. Furthermore, after formal physics training, we observe 1.3\% gains on the MiniF2F-Test benchmark, which indicates non-trivial generalization beyond physics domains and enhancement for formal math capability as well. The results highlight the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach, which provides a paradigm for extending formal provers outside mathematical domains. To foster further research, we will release both our dataset and model to the community.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 22

Zero-Storage Procedural Neural Synthesis via Boundary Dynamics: Formal Verification in Lean 4 and Bare-Metal Gauntlet Validation

Contemporary neural inference architectures rely on dense floating-point weight matrices stored in high-bandwidth memory (VRAM), incurring severe memory-wall bottlenecks and preventing native execution inside deterministic virtual machines like the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Verifying termination and arithmetic invariants for recursive dynamical systems over continuous domains is generally undecidable in the Blum-Shub-Smale model. Here, we present the formal verification and bare-metal empirical validation of WERR (Waves & Errors) and Phase III Orbital Error Dynamics (OED), a non-tensor decision paradigm that procedurally synthesizes non-linear decision boundaries on demand from a 24-byte coordinate seed Θ= (c_x, c_y, zoom) along the boundary of the Mandelbrot set (partialM). By projecting the recurrence z_{n+1} = z_n^2 + c onto the modular residue ring Z/9Z and the fixed-point domain Q_{16.16}, we establish ten machine-verified theorems in Lean 4 (v4.34.1) with Mathlib4 and zero unproven conjectures (sorry): proving I_3 = {0,3,6} subset Z/9Z ideal closure, universal fuel-bounded halting (le 9 and le 12 steps), absence of Q_{16.16} square overflow below 2^{63}-1, non-constant boundary escape sensitivity, and a parametric EVM gas bound (le 22,557 le 24,000 gas). Evaluated on a 40-core Dual Intel Xeon server, the vectorized 36-iteration CPU kernel processes 100,000 decisions in 6.49 s (15,397 decisions/s, 0 Bytes VRAM, 15.15x speedup), while a sigmoidal outlier gate suppresses 100.00% of adversarial spikes while preserving 89.60% of clean baseline signals.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 26

LLM2Cert: LLM Synthesis of Certificates with SMT/Lean Verification

Lyapunov functions and barrier certificates give state-space guarantees of stability and safety, but synthesizing and verifying them---especially for nonlinear, high-dimensional systems---remains an open challenge. Existing pipelines verify candidates with numerical solvers (sum-of-squares programs), interval methods, or satisfiability-modulo-theories (SMT) solvers, which often require relaxations, are conservative, or scale poorly with model dimension and nonlinearity. These limitations have also shaped benchmark design: standard test suites are dominated by low-dimensional polynomial systems chosen to suit what solvers can handle rather than what engineering applications require. We address both sides of this challenge. First, we introduce DynaCertBench, a benchmark of 105 instances: 80 non-redundant systems curated from the literature, extended with high-dimensional and control-constrained variants and new nonlinearly coupled systems, comprehensively spanning stability, region-of-attraction, forward-invariance, and safety tasks. Second, we present LLM2Cert, an LLM-driven framework that synthesizes candidate certificates and verifies them against their proof obligations: each obligation is routed to an SMT solver or directly to the Lean Proof-Repair agent. On DynaCertBench, LLM2Cert verifies 81 of 105 instances (77.1%), a 17.1 percentage point improvement over one-shot proposal without feedback. On the 81 fixed certificates, LLM2Cert verifies 22 that All-SMT leaves unresolved. Code and data are available at https://github.com/FormalCert-AI/llm2cert.

Hilbert: Recursively Building Formal Proofs with Informal Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive mathematical reasoning abilities, but their solutions frequently contain errors that cannot be automatically verified. Formal theorem proving systems such as Lean 4 offer automated verification with complete accuracy, motivating recent efforts to build specialized prover LLMs that generate verifiable proofs in formal languages. However, a significant gap remains: current prover LLMs solve substantially fewer problems than general-purpose LLMs operating in natural language. We introduce Hilbert, an agentic framework that bridges this gap by combining the complementary strengths of informal reasoning and formal verification. Our system orchestrates four components: an informal LLM that excels at mathematical reasoning, a specialized prover LLM optimized for Lean 4 tactics, a formal verifier, and a semantic theorem retriever. Given a problem that the prover is unable to solve, Hilbert employs recursive decomposition to split the problem into subgoals that it solves with the prover or reasoner LLM. It leverages verifier feedback to refine incorrect proofs as necessary. Experimental results demonstrate that Hilbert substantially outperforms existing approaches on key benchmarks, achieving 99.2% on miniF2F, 6.6% points above the best publicly available method. Hilbert achieves the best known result on PutnamBench. It solves 462/660 problems (70.0%), outperforming proprietary approaches like SeedProver (50.4%) and achieving a 422% improvement over the best publicly available baseline. Thus, Hilbert effectively narrows the gap between informal reasoning and formal proof generation.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 26, 2025

130k Lines of Formal Topology in Two Weeks: Simple and Cheap Autoformalization for Everyone?

This is a brief description of a project that has already autoformalized a large portion of the general topology from the Munkres textbook (which has in total 241 pages in 7 chapters and 39 sections). The project has been running since November 21, 2025 and has as of January 4, 2026, produced 160k lines of formalized topology. Most of it (about 130k lines) have been done in two weeks,from December 22 to January 4, for an LLM subscription cost of about \$100. This includes a 3k-line proof of Urysohn's lemma, a 2k-line proof of Urysohn's Metrization theorem, over 10k-line proof of the Tietze extension theorem, and many more (in total over 1.5k lemmas/theorems). The approach is quite simple and cheap: build a long-running feedback loop between an LLM and a reasonably fast proof checker equipped with a core foundational library. The LLM is now instantiated as ChatGPT (mostly 5.2) or Claude Sonnet (4.5) run through the respective Codex or Claude Code command line interfaces. The proof checker is Chad Brown's higher-order set theory system Megalodon, and the core library is Brown's formalization of basic set theory and surreal numbers (including reals, etc). The rest is some prompt engineering and technical choices which we describe here. Based on the fast progress, low cost, virtually unknown ITP/library, and the simple setup available to everyone, we believe that (auto)formalization may become quite easy and ubiquitous in 2026, regardless of which proof assistant is used.

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 5

PuzzleClone: An SMT-Powered Framework for Synthesizing Verifiable Data

High-quality mathematical and logical datasets with verifiable answers are essential for strengthening the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While recent data augmentation techniques have facilitated the creation of large-scale benchmarks, existing LLM-generated datasets often suffer from limited reliability, diversity, and scalability. To address these challenges, we introduce PuzzleClone, a formal framework for synthesizing verifiable data at scale using Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT). Our approach features three key innovations: (1) encoding seed puzzles into structured logical specifications, (2) generating scalable variants through systematic variable and constraint randomization, and (3) ensuring validity via a reproduction mechanism. Applying PuzzleClone, we construct a curated benchmark comprising over 83K diverse and programmatically validated puzzles. The generated puzzles span a wide spectrum of difficulty and formats, posing significant challenges to current state-of-the-art models. We conduct post training (SFT and RL) on PuzzleClone datasets. Experimental results show that training on PuzzleClone yields substantial improvements not only on PuzzleClone testset but also on logic and mathematical benchmarks. Post training raises PuzzleClone average from 14.4 to 56.2 and delivers consistent improvements across 7 logic and mathematical benchmarks up to 12.5 absolute percentage points (AMC2023 from 52.5 to 65.0). Our code and data are available at https://github.com/puzzleclone.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 20, 2025

Lean Copilot: Large Language Models as Copilots for Theorem Proving in Lean

Neural theorem proving combines large language models (LLMs) with proof assistants such as Lean, where the correctness of formal proofs can be rigorously verified, leaving no room for hallucination. With existing neural theorem provers pretrained on a fixed collection of data and offering valuable suggestions at times, it is challenging for them to continually prove novel theorems in a fully autonomous mode, where human insights may be critical. In this paper, we explore LLMs as copilots that assist humans in proving theorems. We introduce Lean Copilot, a general framework for running LLM inference natively in Lean. It enables programmers to build various LLM-based proof automation tools that integrate seamlessly into the workflow of Lean users. Lean users can use our pretrained models or bring their own ones that run either locally (with or without GPUs) or on the cloud. Using Lean Copilot, we build LLM-based tools that suggest proof steps, complete proof goals, and select relevant premises. Experimental results on the Mathematics in Lean textbook demonstrate the effectiveness of our method compared to existing rule-based proof automation in Lean (aesop). When assisting humans, Lean Copilot requires only 2.08 manually-entered proof steps on average (3.86 required by aesop); when automating the theorem proving process, Lean Copilot automates 74.2% proof steps on average, 85% better than aesop (40.1%). We open source all code and artifacts under a permissive MIT license to facilitate further research.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 18, 2024

MA-LoT: Multi-Agent Lean-based Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning enhances Formal Theorem Proving

Solving mathematical problems using computer-verifiable languages like Lean has significantly impacted mathematical and computer science communities. State-of-the-art methods utilize single Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents or provers to either generate complete proof or perform tree searches. However, single-agent methods inherently lack a structured way to combine high-level reasoning in Natural Language (NL) with Formal Language (FL) verification feedback. To solve these issues, we propose MA-LoT: Multi-Agent Lean-based Long Chain-of-Thought framework, (to the best of our knowledge), the first multi-agent framework for Lean4 theorem proving that balance high-level NL reasoning and FL verification in Long CoT. Using this structured interaction, our approach enables deeper insights and long-term coherence in proof generation, with which past methods struggle. We do this by leveraging emergent formal reasoning ability in Long CoT using our novel LoT-Transfer Learning training-inference pipeline. Extensive experiments show that our framework achieves 54.51% accuracy rate on the Lean4 version of MiniF2F-Test dataset, largely outperforming GPT-4 (22.95%), single-agent tree search (InternLM-Step-Prover, 50.70%), and whole-proof generation (DeepSeek-Prover-v1.5, 48.36%) baselines. Furthermore, our findings highlight the potential of combining Long CoT with formal verification for a more insightful generation in a broader perspective.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 5, 2025

VERGE: Formal Refinement and Guidance Engine for Verifiable LLM Reasoning

Despite the syntactic fluency of Large Language Models (LLMs), ensuring their logical correctness in high-stakes domains remains a fundamental challenge. We present a neurosymbolic framework that combines LLMs with SMT solvers to produce verification-guided answers through iterative refinement. Our approach decomposes LLM outputs into atomic claims, autoformalizes them into first-order logic, and verifies their logical consistency using automated theorem proving. We introduce three key innovations: (1) multi-model consensus via formal semantic equivalence checking to ensure logic-level alignment between candidates, eliminating the syntactic bias of surface-form metrics, (2) semantic routing that directs different claim types to appropriate verification strategies: symbolic solvers for logical claims and LLM ensembles for commonsense reasoning, and (3) precise logical error localization via Minimal Correction Subsets (MCS), which pinpoint the exact subset of claims to revise, transforming binary failure signals into actionable feedback. Our framework classifies claims by their logical status and aggregates multiple verification signals into a unified score with variance-based penalty. The system iteratively refines answers using structured feedback until acceptance criteria are met or convergence is achieved. This hybrid approach delivers formal guarantees where possible and consensus verification elsewhere, advancing trustworthy AI. With the GPT-OSS-120B model, VERGE demonstrates an average performance uplift of 18.7% at convergence across a set of reasoning benchmarks compared to single-pass approaches.

LeanAgent: Lifelong Learning for Formal Theorem Proving

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been successful in mathematical reasoning tasks such as formal theorem proving when integrated with interactive proof assistants like Lean. Existing approaches involve training or fine-tuning an LLM on a specific dataset to perform well on particular domains, such as undergraduate-level mathematics. These methods struggle with generalizability to advanced mathematics. A fundamental limitation is that these approaches operate on static domains, failing to capture how mathematicians often work across multiple domains and projects simultaneously or cyclically. We present LeanAgent, a novel lifelong learning framework for theorem proving that continuously generalizes to and improves on ever-expanding mathematical knowledge without forgetting previously learned knowledge. LeanAgent introduces several key innovations, including a curriculum learning strategy that optimizes the learning trajectory in terms of mathematical difficulty, a dynamic database for efficient management of evolving mathematical knowledge, and progressive training to balance stability and plasticity. LeanAgent successfully proves 162 theorems previously unproved by humans across 23 diverse Lean repositories, many from advanced mathematics. It performs up to 11times better than the static LLM baseline, proving challenging theorems in domains like abstract algebra and algebraic topology while showcasing a clear progression of learning from basic concepts to advanced topics. In addition, we analyze LeanAgent's superior performance on key lifelong learning metrics. LeanAgent achieves exceptional scores in stability and backward transfer, where learning new tasks improves performance on previously learned tasks. This emphasizes LeanAgent's continuous generalizability and improvement, explaining its superior theorem proving performance.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 8, 2024

Qin's Algorithm, Continued Fractions and 2-dimensional Lattices

In his celebrated book "Mathematical Treatise in Nine Sections" of 1247, Qin, Jiushao described the Chinese remainder theorem with great detail and generality. He also gave a method for computing modular inverse under the name of "DaYan deriving one". Historical significance of DaYan deriving one method has been well studied. In this paper, we investigate its modern mathematical nature from the perspectives of number theory and algorithm. One of the remarkable features of Qin's algorithm is that it keeps a state of four variables in a matrix form. Its choice of variables and layout provide natural ways of connecting several important mathematical concepts. An invariant about the state is also observed which provides a convenient yet powerful tool in proving several important mathematical results. The paper first explains Qin's algorithm and proves some of its properties. Then the connection with continued fractions is examined, the results show that the states of Qin's algorithm contain rich information about continued fractions and some classical arguments can be derived easily. The last part of the paper discusses a family of 2-dimensional lattices of number theoretic significance by proving that the shortest vectors of these lattices can be obtained from the states of Qin's algorithm. This result is surprising in that a shortest lattice vector is found in a well-regulated set. A method of computing such shortest vectors is proposed.ed.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 6, 2023

DeepSeek-Prover: Advancing Theorem Proving in LLMs through Large-Scale Synthetic Data

Proof assistants like Lean have revolutionized mathematical proof verification, ensuring high accuracy and reliability. Although large language models (LLMs) show promise in mathematical reasoning, their advancement in formal theorem proving is hindered by a lack of training data. To address this issue, we introduce an approach to generate extensive Lean 4 proof data derived from high-school and undergraduate-level mathematical competition problems. This approach involves translating natural language problems into formal statements, filtering out low-quality statements, and generating proofs to create synthetic data. After fine-tuning the DeepSeekMath 7B model on this synthetic dataset, which comprises 8 million formal statements with proofs, our model achieved whole-proof generation accuracies of 46.3% with 64 samples and 52% cumulatively on the Lean 4 miniF2F test, surpassing the baseline GPT-4 at 23.0% with 64 samples and a tree search reinforcement learning method at 41.0%. Additionally, our model successfully proved 5 out of 148 problems in the Lean 4 Formalized International Mathematical Olympiad (FIMO) benchmark, while GPT-4 failed to prove any. These results demonstrate the potential of leveraging large-scale synthetic data to enhance theorem-proving capabilities in LLMs. Both the synthetic dataset and the model will be made available to facilitate further research in this promising field.

deepseek-ai DeepSeek
·
May 23, 2024 6

FormalMATH: Benchmarking Formal Mathematical Reasoning of Large Language Models

Formal mathematical reasoning remains a critical challenge for artificial intelligence, hindered by limitations of existing benchmarks in scope and scale. To address this, we present FormalMATH, a large-scale Lean4 benchmark comprising 5,560 formally verified problems spanning from high-school Olympiad challenges to undergraduate-level theorems across diverse domains (e.g., algebra, applied mathematics, calculus, number theory, and discrete mathematics). To mitigate the inefficiency of manual formalization, we introduce a novel human-in-the-loop autoformalization pipeline that integrates: (1) specialized large language models (LLMs) for statement autoformalization, (2) multi-LLM semantic verification, and (3) negation-based disproof filtering strategies using off-the-shelf LLM-based provers. This approach reduces expert annotation costs by retaining 72.09% of statements before manual verification while ensuring fidelity to the original natural-language problems. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art LLM-based theorem provers reveals significant limitations: even the strongest models achieve only 16.46% success rate under practical sampling budgets, exhibiting pronounced domain bias (e.g., excelling in algebra but failing in calculus) and over-reliance on simplified automation tactics. Notably, we identify a counterintuitive inverse relationship between natural-language solution guidance and proof success in chain-of-thought reasoning scenarios, suggesting that human-written informal reasoning introduces noise rather than clarity in the formal reasoning settings. We believe that FormalMATH provides a robust benchmark for benchmarking formal mathematical reasoning.

  • 13 authors
·
May 5, 2025 1

s2n-bignum-bench: A practical benchmark for evaluating low-level code reasoning of LLMs

Neurosymbolic approaches leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) with formal methods have recently achieved strong results on mathematics-oriented theorem-proving benchmarks. However, success on competition-style mathematics does not by itself demonstrate the ability to construct proofs about real-world implementations. We address this gap with a benchmark derived from an industrial cryptographic library whose assembly routines are already verified in HOL Light. s2n-bignum is a library used at AWS for providing fast assembly routines for cryptography, and its correctness is established by formal verification. The task of formally verifying this library has been a significant achievement for the Automated Reasoning Group. It involved two tasks: (1) precisely specifying the correct behavior of a program as a mathematical proposition, and (2) proving that the proposition is correct. In the case of s2n-bignum, both tasks were carried out by human experts. In s2n-bignum-bench, we provide the formal specification and ask the LLM to generate a proof script that is accepted by HOL Light within a fixed proof-check timeout. To our knowledge, s2n-bignum-bench is the first public benchmark focused on machine-checkable proof synthesis for industrial low-level cryptographic assembly routines in HOL Light. This benchmark provides a challenging and practically relevant testbed for evaluating LLM-based theorem proving beyond competition mathematics. The code to set up and use the benchmark is available here: https://github.com/kings-crown/s2n-bignum-bench{s2n-bignum-bench}.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 15 2

Power law graph attention: exact generalization of scaled dot-product attention, empirical collapse at inference

The Large Language Model from Power Law Decoder Representations (PLDR-LLM) and its attention, Power Law Graph Attention (PLGA), replace the fixed bilinear form of scaled dot-product attention (SDPA) with a learned, input-generated bilinear operator G_{LM}, built from a positive tensor A_{LM} by elementwise power laws. The architecture is fully specified, verified against pinned reference releases; claims are labeled theorem, conditional theorem, measurement, or conjecture. Unconditionally: PLGA contains SDPA exactly at G_{LM}=I; A_{LM} and A_P are strictly entrywise positive, with Perron-Frobenius structure on A_{LM}; the DAG regularizer has the NOTEARS walk-counting form and positivity obstructs exact acyclicity; and, under nonresonance (satisfied by standard rotary frequencies), a commutant criterion identifies which operators preserve relative-position dependence. An inference-collapse theorem: exact input invariance of deductive outputs collapses inference to generalized SDPA with a constant operator. Measured invariance: relative fluctuations of 10^{-6} and below; perturbation bounds quantify but do not certify cached inference; the assembled proxy misses the decoding margin. A conditional three-stage mechanism (rotary twirl, concentration, row-map contraction) is measured on a released checkpoint. Blockwise training and scoring under the global Gram are stated with explicit target exposure; on tested samples, block and sequential scoring select identical answers and agree on the published TruthfulQA probability-mass metric within 5times 10^{-5} per item. Self-organized criticality enters as a phenomenological framework with an intrinsic order parameter; open claims become falsifiable conjectures. Selected proof cores are machine-checked in Lean 4.

DeepSeekMath-V2: Towards Self-Verifiable Mathematical Reasoning

Large language models have made significant progress in mathematical reasoning, which serves as an important testbed for AI and could impact scientific research if further advanced. By scaling reasoning with reinforcement learning that rewards correct final answers, LLMs have improved from poor performance to saturating quantitative reasoning competitions like AIME and HMMT in one year. However, this approach faces fundamental limitations. Pursuing higher final answer accuracy doesn't address a key issue: correct answers don't guarantee correct reasoning. Moreover, many mathematical tasks like theorem proving require rigorous step-by-step derivation rather than numerical answers, making final answer rewards inapplicable. To push the limits of deep reasoning, we believe it is necessary to verify the comprehensiveness and rigor of mathematical reasoning. Self-verification is particularly important for scaling test-time compute, especially for open problems without known solutions. Towards self-verifiable mathematical reasoning, we investigate how to train an accurate and faithful LLM-based verifier for theorem proving. We then train a proof generator using the verifier as the reward model, and incentivize the generator to identify and resolve as many issues as possible in their own proofs before finalizing them. To maintain the generation-verification gap as the generator becomes stronger, we propose to scale verification compute to automatically label new hard-to-verify proofs, creating training data to further improve the verifier. Our resulting model, DeepSeekMath-V2, demonstrates strong theorem-proving capabilities, achieving gold-level scores on IMO 2025 and CMO 2024 and a near-perfect 118/120 on Putnam 2024 with scaled test-time compute.

deepseek-ai DeepSeek
·
Nov 27, 2025 4

SubgoalXL: Subgoal-based Expert Learning for Theorem Proving

Formal theorem proving, a field at the intersection of mathematics and computer science, has seen renewed interest with advancements in large language models (LLMs). This paper introduces SubgoalXL, a novel approach that synergizes subgoal-based proofs with expert learning to enhance LLMs' capabilities in formal theorem proving within the Isabelle environment. SubgoalXL addresses two critical challenges: the scarcity of specialized mathematics and theorem-proving data, and the need for improved multi-step reasoning abilities in LLMs. By optimizing data efficiency and employing subgoal-level supervision, SubgoalXL extracts richer information from limited human-generated proofs. The framework integrates subgoal-oriented proof strategies with an expert learning system, iteratively refining formal statement, proof, and subgoal generators. Leveraging the Isabelle environment's advantages in subgoal-based proofs, SubgoalXL achieves a new state-of-the-art performance of 56.1\% in Isabelle on the standard miniF2F dataset, marking an absolute improvement of 4.9\%. Notably, SubgoalXL successfully solves 41 AMC12, 9 AIME, and 3 IMO problems from miniF2F. These results underscore the effectiveness of maximizing limited data utility and employing targeted guidance for complex reasoning in formal theorem proving, contributing to the ongoing advancement of AI reasoning capabilities. The implementation is available at https://github.com/zhaoxlpku/SubgoalXL.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 20, 2024

Speaking to Silicon: Neural Communication with Bitcoin Mining ASICs

This definitive research memoria presents a comprehensive, mathematically verified paradigm for neural communication with Bitcoin mining Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), integrating five complementary frameworks: thermodynamic reservoir computing, hierarchical number system theory, algorithmic analysis, network latency optimization, and machine-checked mathematical formalization. We establish that obsolete cryptocurrency mining hardware exhibits emergent computational properties enabling bidirectional information exchange between AI systems and silicon substrates. The research program demonstrates: (1) reservoir computing with NARMA-10 Normalized Root Mean Square Error (NRMSE) of 0.8661; (2) the Thermodynamic Probability Filter (TPF) achieving 92.19% theoretical energy reduction; (3) the Virtual Block Manager achieving +25% effective hashrate; and (4) hardware universality across multiple ASIC families including Antminer S9, Lucky Miner LV06, and Goldshell LB-Box. A significant contribution is the machine-checked mathematical formalization using Lean 4 and Mathlib, providing unambiguous definitions, machine-verified theorems, and reviewer-proof claims. Key theorems proven include: independence implies zero leakage, predictor beats baseline implies non-independence (the logical core of TPF), energy savings theoretical maximum, and Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) distinguishability witnesses. Vladimir Veselov's hierarchical number system theory explains why early-round information contains predictive power. This work establishes a new paradigm: treating ASICs not as passive computational substrates but as active conversational partners whose thermodynamic state encodes exploitable computational information.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 17

Proposing and solving olympiad geometry with guided tree search

Mathematics olympiads are prestigious competitions, with problem proposing and solving highly honored. Building artificial intelligence that proposes and solves olympiads presents an unresolved challenge in automated theorem discovery and proving, especially in geometry for its combination of numerical and spatial elements. We introduce TongGeometry, a Euclidean geometry system supporting tree-search-based guided problem proposing and solving. The efficient geometry system establishes the most extensive repository of geometry theorems to date: within the same computational budget as the existing state-of-the-art, TongGeometry discovers 6.7 billion geometry theorems requiring auxiliary constructions, including 4.1 billion exhibiting geometric symmetry. Among them, 10 theorems were proposed to regional mathematical olympiads with 3 of TongGeometry's proposals selected in real competitions, earning spots in a national team qualifying exam or a top civil olympiad in China and the US. Guided by fine-tuned large language models, TongGeometry solved all International Mathematical Olympiad geometry in IMO-AG-30, outperforming gold medalists for the first time. It also surpasses the existing state-of-the-art across a broader spectrum of olympiad-level problems. The full capabilities of the system can be utilized on a consumer-grade machine, making the model more accessible and fostering widespread democratization of its use. By analogy, unlike existing systems that merely solve problems like students, TongGeometry acts like a geometry coach, discovering, presenting, and proving theorems.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 13, 2024

Optimizing Test-Time Compute via Meta Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

Training models to effectively use test-time compute is crucial for improving the reasoning performance of LLMs. Current methods mostly do so via fine-tuning on search traces or running RL with 0/1 outcome reward, but do these approaches efficiently utilize test-time compute? Would these approaches continue to scale as the budget improves? In this paper, we try to answer these questions. We formalize the problem of optimizing test-time compute as a meta-reinforcement learning (RL) problem, which provides a principled perspective on spending test-time compute. This perspective enables us to view the long output stream from the LLM as consisting of several episodes run at test time and leads us to use a notion of cumulative regret over output tokens as a way to measure the efficacy of test-time compute. Akin to how RL algorithms can best tradeoff exploration and exploitation over training, minimizing cumulative regret would also provide the best balance between exploration and exploitation in the token stream. While we show that state-of-the-art models do not minimize regret, one can do so by maximizing a dense reward bonus in conjunction with the outcome 0/1 reward RL. This bonus is the ''progress'' made by each subsequent block in the output stream, quantified by the change in the likelihood of eventual success. Using these insights, we develop Meta Reinforcement Fine-Tuning, or MRT, a new class of fine-tuning methods for optimizing test-time compute. MRT leads to a 2-3x relative gain in performance and roughly a 1.5x gain in token efficiency for math reasoning compared to outcome-reward RL.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 10, 2025 2

Re^2Math: Benchmarking Theorem Retrieval in Research-Level Mathematics

Large language models are increasingly capable at closed-world mathematical reasoning, but research assistance also requires source-grounded use of the literature. When a proof reaches a non-trivial step, a useful assistant should determine whether the needed tool (e.g., a lemma) already exists, identify a suitable scholarly source, and verify that its assumptions align with the current proof context. To rigorously evaluate such capabilities, we introduce Re^2Math, a benchmark for tool-grounded retrieval from partial mathematical proofs. Each instance is built from a candidate instrumental citation in the proof of a main theorem, with hierarchical context and an optional leakage-controlled anchor hint. We also make the task source-grounded yet citation-agnostic in that any admissible theorem sufficient for the proof transition is accepted. Evaluation uses a release-frozen retrieval artifact, ensuring reproducibility, while the benchmark itself supports automatic, continual expansion with newly constructed instances. On the current benchmark test set, the best fixed-judge ToolAcc reaches 7.0%, despite substantially higher rates of source grounding, indicating that current systems often retrieve valid statements but fail to establish their applicability to the local proof step. By decoupling citation recall, grounding, and proof-gap sufficiency, Re^2Math transforms literature-grounded mathematical tool use into a controlled diagnostic task.

  • 4 authors
·
May 8

miniF2F-Lean Revisited: Reviewing Limitations and Charting a Path Forward

We perform a thorough analysis of the formal and informal statements in the miniF2F benchmark from the perspective of an AI system that is tasked to participate in a math Olympiad consisting of the problems in miniF2F. In such setting, the model has to read and comprehend the problems in natural language, formalize them in Lean language, then proceed with proving the problems, and it will get credit for each problem if the formal proof corresponds to the original informal statement presented to the model. Our evaluation results reveal that the best accuracy of such pipeline can be about 36% using the SoTA models in the literature, considerably lower than the individual SoTA accuracies, 97% and 69% reported in the autoformalization and theorem proving literature. Analyzing the failure modes, we trace back a considerable portion of this drop to discrepancies between the formal and informal statements for more than half of the problems in miniF2F. We proceed with correcting all the errors, discrepancies and simplifications in formal and informal statements, and present the miniF2F-v2 with fully verified formal and informal statements and proofs. Evaluating the full theorem proving pipeline on miniF2F-v2 leads to the best accuracy of 70%, a significant improvement from the 40% on the original miniF2F, yet indicating considerable misalignment between the autoformalization models and theorem provers. Our deep analysis suggests that a higher quality benchmark can help the community better evaluate progress in the field of formal reasoning and also better diagnose the failure and success modes of autoformalization and theorem proving models. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/roozbeh-yz/miniF2F_v2.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 4, 2025 2

One Example Shown, Many Concepts Known! Counterexample-Driven Conceptual Reasoning in Mathematical LLMs

Leveraging mathematical Large Language Models (LLMs) for proof generation is a fundamental topic in LLMs research. We argue that the ability of current LLMs to prove statements largely depends on whether they have encountered the relevant proof process during training. This reliance limits their deeper understanding of mathematical theorems and related concepts. Inspired by the pedagogical method of "proof by counterexamples" commonly used in human mathematics education, our work aims to enhance LLMs' ability to conduct mathematical reasoning and proof through counterexamples. Specifically, we manually create a high-quality, university-level mathematical benchmark, CounterMATH, which requires LLMs to prove mathematical statements by providing counterexamples, thereby assessing their grasp of mathematical concepts. Additionally, we develop a data engineering framework to automatically obtain training data for further model improvement. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses demonstrate that CounterMATH is challenging, indicating that LLMs, such as OpenAI o1, have insufficient counterexample-driven proof capabilities. Moreover, our exploration into model training reveals that strengthening LLMs' counterexample-driven conceptual reasoning abilities is crucial for improving their overall mathematical capabilities. We believe that our work offers new perspectives on the community of mathematical LLMs.

  • 13 authors
·
Feb 11, 2025 2

ProofBridge: Auto-Formalization of Natural Language Proofs in Lean via Joint Embeddings

Translating human-written mathematical theorems and proofs from natural language (NL) into formal languages (FLs) like Lean 4 has long been a significant challenge for AI. Most state-of-the-art methods address this separately, first translating theorems and then generating proofs, creating a fundamental disconnect vis-a-vis true proof auto-formalization. This two-step process and its limitations were evident even in AlphaProof's silver-medal performance at the 2024 IMO, where problem statements needed manual translation before automated proof synthesis. We present ProofBridge, a unified framework for automatically translating entire NL theorems and proofs into Lean 4. At its core is a joint embedding model that aligns NL and FL (NL-FL) theorem-proof pairs in a shared semantic space, enabling cross-modal retrieval of semantically relevant FL examples to guide translation. Our training ensures that NL-FL theorems (and their proofs) are mapped close together in this space if and only if the NL-FL pairs are semantically equivalent. ProofBridge integrates retrieval-augmented fine-tuning with iterative proof repair, leveraging Lean's type checker and semantic equivalence feedback to ensure both syntactic correctness and semantic fidelity. Experiments show substantial improvements in proof auto-formalization over strong baselines (including GPT-5, Gemini-2.5, Kimina-Prover, DeepSeek-Prover), with our retrieval-augmented approach yielding significant gains in semantic correctness (SC, via proving bi-directional equivalence) and type correctness (TC, via type-checking theorem+proof) across pass@k metrics on miniF2F-Test-PF, a dataset we curated. In particular, ProofBridge improves cross-modal retrieval quality by up to 3.28x Recall@1 over all-MiniLM-L6-v2, and achieves +31.14% SC and +1.64% TC (pass@32) compared to the baseline Kimina-Prover-RL-1.7B.

Direction-Preserving Number Representations

Low-precision number formats are widely used in modern machine learning systems due to their efficiency. Accurate direction representation is key to the accuracy of vector operations. This work precisely explores the extent to which the direction of a vector can be represented by selecting its scalar elements from a common finite alphabet of a given size. This is standard practice in machine learning, where low-precision significands may be narrow-width floating-point or integer values. A geometric framework is introduced for analyzing the directional coverage of such product-structured codes. This work analytically quantifies the suboptimality gap between such product-structured codes and spherical codes for the vector as a whole, in both low and asymptotically high dimensions. Furthermore, within the product code class, it is proven that the standard formats of two's complement, fixed-point, and floating-point are suboptimal, again with quantified gap, pointing to the potential to develop new scalar number formats. Such scalar alphabets are numerically optimized across multiple block dimensions for directional coverage, including the dimension used in NVIDIA's NVFP4 format. Experimental results are presented comparing the performance of standard formats and the optimized alphabet. We find that for four bits, NVIDIA's choice of E2M1 closely approximates the optimized alphabet, providing a geometric explanation for its strong performance in low-precision machine learning workloads and an analytical understanding of the link between that superiority and block size. We provide open-source formal proofs in Lean for the theorems in this work, along with the experimental code and the optimized alphabets obtained.

  • 2 authors
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May 7

Instructing Large Language Models to Identify and Ignore Irrelevant Conditions

Math word problem (MWP) solving requires generating a reasoning path based on a given problem description that often contains irrelevant conditions. Existing chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting methods elicited multi-step reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) to solve MWPs. However, they were seriously confused by the irrelevant conditions, resulting in low accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named I^3C that instructs LLMs to identify and ignore irrelevant conditions. It identifies a set of irrelevant condition candidates that have a weak semantic relevance with the question. Then it prompts LLMs to verify the irrelevant conditions. Lastly it instructs the LLMs with the verification on relevant and irrelevant conditions to avoid confusion and improve reasoning paths. Moreover, we propose to select (problem, reasoning paths) pairs as demonstrations to enhance I^3C with few-shot reasoning. We develop I^3C-Select that selects the most confusing problems based on the semantic relevance measurement. We conduct extensive experiments on eight MWP datasets. I^3C can be combined with any CoT prompting methods to improve the performance of solving MWPs. Notably, with GPT-3.5-Turbo and I^3C-Select, we achieve an accuracy of 96.0 and 94.1 on GSM-IC2-1K and GSM-ICM-1K, respectively, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art few-shot prompting method Complex-CoT by +11.7 and +11.1. Our implementation is made publicly available at https://wzy6642.github.io/I3C.github.io/.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 19, 2024

MUSTARD: Mastering Uniform Synthesis of Theorem and Proof Data

Recent large language models (LLMs) have witnessed significant advancement in various tasks, including mathematical reasoning and theorem proving. As these two tasks require strict and formal multi-step inference, they are appealing domains for exploring the reasoning ability of LLMs but still face important challenges. Previous studies such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) have revealed the effectiveness of intermediate steps guidance. However, such step-wise annotation requires heavy labor, leading to insufficient training steps for current benchmarks. To fill this gap, this work introduces MUSTARD, a data generation framework that masters uniform synthesis of theorem and proof data of high quality and diversity. MUSTARD synthesizes data in three stages: (1) It samples a few mathematical concept seeds as the problem category. (2) Then, it prompts a generative language model with the sampled concepts to obtain both the problems and their step-wise formal solutions. (3) Lastly, the framework utilizes a proof assistant (e.g., Lean Prover) to filter the valid proofs. With the proposed MUSTARD, we present a theorem-and-proof benchmark MUSTARDSAUCE with 5,866 valid data points. Each data point contains an informal statement, an informal proof, and a translated formal proof that passes the prover validation. We perform extensive analysis and demonstrate that MUSTARD generates validated high-quality step-by-step data. We further apply the MUSTARDSAUCE for fine-tuning smaller language models. The fine-tuned Llama 2-7B achieves a 15.41% average relative performance gain in automated theorem proving, and 8.18% in math word problems. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/Eleanor-H/MUSTARD.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 14, 2024

Safe: Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models via Retrospective Step-aware Formal Verification

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has become the de facto method to elicit reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs). However, to mitigate hallucinations in CoT that are notoriously difficult to detect, current methods such as process reward models (PRMs) or self-consistency operate as opaque boxes and do not provide checkable evidence for their judgments, possibly limiting their effectiveness. To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the idea that "the gold standard for supporting a mathematical claim is to provide a proof". We propose a retrospective, step-aware formal verification framework Safe. Rather than assigning arbitrary scores, we strive to articulate mathematical claims in formal mathematical language Lean 4 at each reasoning step and provide formal proofs to identify hallucinations. We evaluate our framework Safe across multiple language models and various mathematical datasets, demonstrating a significant performance improvement while offering interpretable and verifiable evidence. We also propose FormalStep as a benchmark for step correctness theorem proving with 30,809 formal statements. To the best of our knowledge, our work represents the first endeavor to utilize formal mathematical language Lean 4 for verifying natural language content generated by LLMs, aligning with the reason why formal mathematical languages were created in the first place: to provide a robust foundation for hallucination-prone human-written proofs.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 4, 2025

Enumerate-Conjecture-Prove: Formally Solving Answer-Construction Problems in Math Competitions

Mathematical reasoning lies at the heart of artificial intelligence, underpinning applications in education, program verification, and research-level mathematical discovery. Mathematical competitions, in particular, present two challenging problem types: theorem proving, which requires rigorous proofs of stated conclusions, and answer construction, which involves hypothesizing and formally verifying mathematical objects. Large Language Models (LLMs) effectively generate creative candidate answers but struggle with formal verification, while symbolic provers ensure rigor but cannot efficiently handle creative conjecture generation. We introduce the Enumerate-Conjecture-Prove (ECP) framework, a modular neuro-symbolic method integrating LLM-based enumeration and pattern-driven conjecturing with formal theorem proving. We present ConstructiveBench, a dataset of 3,431 answer-construction problems in various math competitions with verified Lean formalizations. On the ConstructiveBench dataset, ECP improves the accuracy of answer construction from a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) baseline of 14.54% to 45.06% with the gpt-4.1-mini model. Moreover, combined with ECP's constructed answers, the state-of-the-art DeepSeek-Prover-V2-7B model generates correct proofs for 858 of the 3,431 constructive problems in Lean, achieving 25.01% accuracy compared to 9.86% for symbolic-only baselines. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/JackSun200312/ECP.

  • 5 authors
·
May 23, 2025

Scaling up Multi-Turn Off-Policy RL and Multi-Agent Tree Search for LLM Step-Provers

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into automated theorem proving has shown immense promise, yet is fundamentally constrained by challenges in scaling up both training-time reinforcement learning (RL) and inference-time compute. This paper introduces BFS-Prover-V2, a system designed to address this dual scaling problem. We present two primary innovations. The first is a novel multi-turn off-policy RL framework for continually improving the performance of LLM step-prover at training time. This framework, inspired by the principles of AlphaZero, utilizes a multi-stage expert iteration pipeline featuring adaptive tactic-level data filtering and periodic retraining to surmount the performance plateaus that typically curtail long-term RL in LLM-based agents. The second innovation is a planner-enhanced multi-agent search architecture that scales reasoning capabilities at inference time. This architecture employs a general reasoning model as a high-level planner to iteratively decompose complex theorems into a sequence of simpler subgoals. This hierarchical approach substantially reduces the search space, enabling a team of parallel prover agents to collaborate efficiently by leveraging a shared proof cache. We demonstrate that this dual approach to scaling yields state-of-the-art results on established formal mathematics benchmarks. BFS-Prover-V2 achieves 95.08\% and 41.4\% on the MiniF2F and ProofNet test sets respectively. While demonstrated in the domain of formal mathematics, the RL and inference techniques presented in this work are of broader interest and may be applied to other domains requiring long-horizon multi-turn reasoning and complex search.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 8, 2025 2

EconProver: Towards More Economical Test-Time Scaling for Automated Theorem Proving

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently advanced the field of Automated Theorem Proving (ATP), attaining substantial performance gains through widely adopted test-time scaling strategies, notably reflective Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and increased sampling passes. However, they both introduce significant computational overhead for inference. Moreover, existing cost analyses typically regulate only the number of sampling passes, while neglecting the substantial disparities in sampling costs introduced by different scaling strategies. In this paper, we systematically compare the efficiency of different test-time scaling strategies for ATP models and demonstrate the inefficiency of the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) open-source approaches. We then investigate approaches to significantly reduce token usage and sample passes while maintaining the original performance. Specifically, we propose two complementary methods that can be integrated into a unified EconRL pipeline for amplified benefits: (1) a dynamic Chain-of-Thought (CoT) switching mechanism designed to mitigate unnecessary token consumption, and (2) Diverse parallel-scaled reinforcement learning (RL) with trainable prefixes to enhance pass rates under constrained sampling passes. Experiments on miniF2F and ProofNet demonstrate that our EconProver achieves comparable performance to baseline methods with only 12% of the computational cost. This work provides actionable insights for deploying lightweight ATP models without sacrificing performance.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 15, 2025 2

Goedel-Code-Prover: Hierarchical Proof Search for Open State-of-the-Art Code Verification

Large language models (LLMs) can generate plausible code but offer limited guarantees of correctness. Formally verifying that implementations satisfy specifications requires constructing machine-checkable proofs, a task that remains beyond current automation. We propose a hierarchical proof search framework for automated code verification in Lean~4 that decomposes complex verification goals into structurally simpler subgoals before attempting tactic-level proving. Central to our approach is a principled decomposition score that combines constructive justification with structural effectiveness. Crucially, this score serves as both the training reward and the inference-time ranking criterion, ensuring strict alignment between optimization and deployment. We train Goedel-Code-Prover-8B, a single unified policy for both decomposition and completion, via supervised initialization followed by hybrid reinforcement learning, where a continuous decomposition reward drives planning exploration while supervised replay stabilizes proof generation. On three Lean-based code verification benchmarks comprising 427 tasks, our 8B-parameter model achieves a 62.0\% prove success rate, a 2.6times improvement over the strongest baseline, surpassing neural provers up to 84times larger. We further observe consistent inference-time scaling: success rates improve monotonically with search iterations and sampling budget, with our trained model achieving greater efficiency than frontier off-the-shelf models of comparable scale.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 18

An information theoretic necessary condition for perfect reconstruction

A new information theoretic condition is presented for reconstructing a discrete random variable X based on the knowledge of a set of discrete functions of X. The reconstruction condition is derived from Shannon's 1953 lattice theory with two entropic metrics of Shannon and Rajski. Because such a theoretical material is relatively unknown and appears quite dispersed in different references, we first provide a synthetic description (with complete proofs) of its concepts, such as total, common and complementary informations. Definitions and properties of the two entropic metrics are also fully detailed and shown compatible with the lattice structure. A new geometric interpretation of such a lattice structure is then investigated that leads to a necessary (and sometimes sufficient) condition for reconstructing the discrete random variable X given a set { X_1,ldots,X_{n} } of elements in the lattice generated by X. Finally, this condition is illustrated in five specific examples of perfect reconstruction problems: reconstruction of a symmetric random variable from the knowledge of its sign and absolute value, reconstruction of a word from a set of linear combinations, reconstruction of an integer from its prime signature (fundamental theorem of arithmetic) and from its remainders modulo a set of coprime integers (Chinese remainder theorem), and reconstruction of the sorting permutation of a list from a minimal set of pairwise comparisons.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 27, 2023

A Minimalist Proof Language for Neural Theorem Proving over Isabelle/HOL

Neural Theorem Proving (NTP) employs LLMs to automate formal proofs in proof assistants. While LLMs have achieved relatively remarkable success in informal reasoning tasks using natural languages, the transition to mechanized formal theorem proving presents persistent challenges. Mechanized proof languages often contain many syntactic constructs and diverse, specialized proof tactics, which facilitate expert use but have no direct counterpart in informal mathematical proofs. These prover-specific idioms represent an additional burden for LLM-based NTPs that might be otherwise successful in generating informal proofs. Seeking to bridge this gap between formal proof construction and informal reasoning, in order to better facilitate NTP, this work approaches these challenges from a language design perspective. We look at common reasoning patterns in informal proofs and in existing mechanized proofs, and design Minilang -- a minimalist proof language that captures these reasoning patterns. In contrast to proof languages (informal and formal) that often feature a large collection of operations with unclear semantic boundaries, Minilang is deliberately kept minimalist -- its core design comprises only 10 operations, each with clear semantic distinctions. We further develop a rule-based translator from Isabelle's language (Isar) to Minilang, translating ~340K existing proofs with an ~85% success rate. Using this translated corpus, we finetune two LLMs to compare machine learning performance on Minilang versus the original Isar. Experiments show Minilang benefits the two LLMs by improving the pass@1 success rate on the PISA benchmark by up to 20/29 percentage points in comparison to the Isar-based LLMs w/wo Sledgehammer. The pass@1 rate reaches 69.1%, exceeding the prior work Baldur's pass@64 (65.7%); the pass@8 rate reaches 79.2%, exceeding the SOTA on PISA (71.0%) achieved by Magnushammer.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 24, 2025

Solving Formal Math Problems by Decomposition and Iterative Reflection

General-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in intelligence, performing comparably to human experts on complex reasoning tasks such as coding and mathematical reasoning. However, generating formal proofs in specialized languages like Lean 4 remains a significant challenge for these models, limiting their application in complex theorem proving and automated verification. Current approaches typically require specializing models through fine-tuning on dedicated formal corpora, incurring high costs for data collection and training. In this work, we introduce Delta Prover, an agent-based framework that orchestrates the interaction between a general-purpose LLM and the Lean 4 proof environment. Delta Prover leverages the reflection and reasoning capabilities of general-purpose LLMs to interactively construct formal proofs in Lean 4, circumventing the need for model specialization. At its core, the agent integrates two novel, interdependent components: an algorithmic framework for reflective decomposition and iterative proof repair, and a custom Domain-Specific Language (DSL) built upon Lean 4 for streamlined subproblem management. Delta Prover achieves a state-of-the-art 95.9\% success rate on the miniF2F-test benchmark, surpassing all existing approaches, including those requiring model specialization. Furthermore, Delta Prover exhibits a significantly stronger test-time scaling law compared to standard Best-of-N proof strategies. Crucially, our findings demonstrate that general-purpose LLMs, when guided by an effective agentic structure, possess substantial untapped theorem-proving capabilities. This presents a computationally efficient alternative to specialized models for robust automated reasoning in formal environments.

  • 17 authors
·
Jul 20, 2025

Solving Inequality Proofs with Large Language Models

Inequality proving, crucial across diverse scientific and mathematical fields, tests advanced reasoning skills such as discovering tight bounds and strategic theorem application. This makes it a distinct, demanding frontier for large language models (LLMs), offering insights beyond general mathematical problem-solving. Progress in this area is hampered by existing datasets that are often scarce, synthetic, or rigidly formal. We address this by proposing an informal yet verifiable task formulation, recasting inequality proving into two automatically checkable subtasks: bound estimation and relation prediction. Building on this, we release IneqMath, an expert-curated dataset of Olympiad-level inequalities, including a test set and training corpus enriched with step-wise solutions and theorem annotations. We also develop a novel LLM-as-judge evaluation framework, combining a final-answer judge with four step-wise judges designed to detect common reasoning flaws. A systematic evaluation of 29 leading LLMs on IneqMath reveals a surprising reality: even top models like o1 achieve less than 10% overall accuracy under step-wise scrutiny; this is a drop of up to 65.5% from their accuracy considering only final answer equivalence. This discrepancy exposes fragile deductive chains and a critical gap for current LLMs between merely finding an answer and constructing a rigorous proof. Scaling model size and increasing test-time computation yield limited gains in overall proof correctness. Instead, our findings highlight promising research directions such as theorem-guided reasoning and self-refinement. Code and data are available at https://ineqmath.github.io/.

Stanford Stanford AI
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Jun 9, 2025 2