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Nov 3

Agentic Proving for Program Verification

Agentic systems have recently emerged as state-of-the-art approaches for automated theorem proving in formal mathematics. To assess how far these capabilities extend to program verification, we evaluate Claude Code in an agentic proving framework on CLEVER, a Lean 4 benchmark for verifiable code generation. Our results show that Claude generates arguably valid specifications for 98.8% of problems (with 81.3% also accepted by CLEVER's isomorphism-based scoring on the correct portion of the benchmark), certifies implementations against correct ground-truth specifications for 87.5% of problems, and reaches a 98.1% success rate on the end-to-end program generation and verification pipeline over entries with self-consistent premises. Across all stages, Claude further provides high-quality feedback on its own attempts (as confirmed under manual review), identifying underlying causes of failure and lingering bugs in the dataset. These findings highlight a growing mismatch between the difficulty of existing program verification benchmarks and the capabilities of modern agentic provers, and point to the need for more rigorous, bug-resilient evaluation methodologies, and in particular for alternatives to isomorphism-based scoring of generated specifications. More broadly, our results provide empirical evidence that tight compiler-in-the-loop agentic paradigms are currently the most effective approach for foundational program verification.

  • 3 authors
·
May 21

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

RMA: an Agentic System for Research-Level Mathematical Problems

We present Research Math Agents (RMA), an agentic framework for automated reasoning on research-level mathematical problems. Unlike prior studies centered on competition mathematics or formal theorem proving, RMA targets research-level mathematical problems that require long-horizon reasoning, literature grounding, and iterative proof refinement. RMA decomposes research-level proof solving into specialized modules for problem analysis, literature search and understanding, fair comparison, knowledge-bank construction, and proof verification, all coordinated by initializer, proposer, and verifier agents through a shared structured memory. Within this unified framework, these agents operate in a multi-role, multi-round workflow, collaboratively generating, refining, and verifying candidate proofs through iterative feedback. We evaluate RMA on the First Proof benchmark, which consists of ten research-level problems contributed by expert mathematicians across diverse domains. Through comprehensive expert evaluation, RMA outperforms strong baselines on the First Proof benchmark, including GPT-5.2R and Aletheia, solving eight out of ten research problems and producing more logically sound and readable proofs. Our comprehensive ablation studies further show that performance gains arise from the interaction of structured reasoning modules, iterative refinement, and verifier-based feedback, rather than any single component. Our solutions and implementations will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

  • 4 authors
·
May 19

Ax-Prover: A Deep Reasoning Agentic Framework for Theorem Proving in Mathematics and Quantum Physics

We present Ax-Prover, a multi-agent system for automated theorem proving in Lean that can solve problems across diverse scientific domains and operate either autonomously or collaboratively with human experts. To achieve this, Ax-Prover approaches scientific problem solving through formal proof generation, a process that demands both creative reasoning and strict syntactic rigor. Ax-Prover meets this challenge by equipping Large Language Models (LLMs), which provide knowledge and reasoning, with Lean tools via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which ensure formal correctness. To evaluate its performance as an autonomous prover, we benchmark our approach against frontier LLMs and specialized prover models on two public math benchmarks and on two Lean benchmarks we introduce in the fields of abstract algebra and quantum theory. On public datasets, Ax-Prover is competitive with state-of-the-art provers, while it largely outperforms them on the new benchmarks. This shows that, unlike specialized systems that struggle to generalize, our tool-based agentic theorem prover approach offers a generalizable methodology for formal verification across diverse scientific domains. Furthermore, we demonstrate Ax-Prover's assistant capabilities in a practical use case, showing how it enabled an expert mathematician to formalize the proof of a complex cryptography theorem.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 14, 2025

Agentic Verification of Software Systems

Automatically generated code is gaining traction recently, owing to the prevalence of Large Language Models (LLMs). Further, the AlphaProof initiative has demonstrated the possibility of using AI for general mathematical reasoning. Reasoning about computer programs (software) can be accomplished via general mathematical reasoning; however, it tends to be more structured and richer in contexts. This forms an attractive proposition, since then AI agents can be used to reason about voluminous code that gets generated by AI. In this work, we present a first LLM agent, AutoRocq, for conducting program verification. Unlike past works, which rely on extensive training of LLMs on proof examples, our agent learns on-the-fly and improves the proof via an iterative refinement loop. The iterative improvement of the proof is achieved by the proof agent communicating with the Rocq (formerly Coq) theorem prover to get additional context and feedback. The final result of the iteration is a proof derivation checked by the Rocq theorem prover. In this way, our proof construction involves autonomous collaboration between the proof agent and the theorem prover. This autonomy facilitates the search for proofs and decision-making in deciding on the structure of the proof tree. Experimental evaluation on SV-COMP benchmarks and on Linux kernel modules shows promising efficacy in achieving automated program verification. As automation in code generation becomes more widespread, we posit that our proof agent can be potentially integrated with AI coding agents to achieve a generate and validate loop, thus moving closer to the vision of trusted automatic programming.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 10

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

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

GSM-Agent: Understanding Agentic Reasoning Using Controllable Environments

As LLMs are increasingly deployed as agents, agentic reasoning - the ability to combine tool use, especially search, and reasoning - becomes a critical skill. However, it is hard to disentangle agentic reasoning when evaluated in complex environments and tasks. Current agent benchmarks often mix agentic reasoning with challenging math reasoning, expert-level knowledge, and other advanced capabilities. To fill this gap, we build a novel benchmark, GSM-Agent, where an LLM agent is required to solve grade-school-level reasoning problems, but is only presented with the question in the prompt without the premises that contain the necessary information to solve the task, and needs to proactively collect that information using tools. Although the original tasks are grade-school math problems, we observe that even frontier models like GPT-5 only achieve 67% accuracy. To understand and analyze the agentic reasoning patterns, we propose the concept of agentic reasoning graph: cluster the environment's document embeddings into nodes, and map each tool call to its nearest node to build a reasoning path. Surprisingly, we identify that the ability to revisit a previously visited node, widely taken as a crucial pattern in static reasoning, is often missing for agentic reasoning for many models. Based on the insight, we propose a tool-augmented test-time scaling method to improve LLM's agentic reasoning performance by adding tools to encourage models to revisit. We expect our benchmark and the agentic reasoning framework to aid future studies of understanding and pushing the boundaries of agentic reasoning.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 1, 2025

Agentic Reasoning for Large Language Models

Reasoning is a fundamental cognitive process underlying inference, problem-solving, and decision-making. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities in closed-world settings, they struggle in open-ended and dynamic environments. Agentic reasoning marks a paradigm shift by reframing LLMs as autonomous agents that plan, act, and learn through continual interaction. In this survey, we organize agentic reasoning along three complementary dimensions. First, we characterize environmental dynamics through three layers: foundational agentic reasoning, which establishes core single-agent capabilities including planning, tool use, and search in stable environments; self-evolving agentic reasoning, which studies how agents refine these capabilities through feedback, memory, and adaptation; and collective multi-agent reasoning, which extends intelligence to collaborative settings involving coordination, knowledge sharing, and shared goals. Across these layers, we distinguish in-context reasoning, which scales test-time interaction through structured orchestration, from post-training reasoning, which optimizes behaviors via reinforcement learning and supervised fine-tuning. We further review representative agentic reasoning frameworks across real-world applications and benchmarks, including science, robotics, healthcare, autonomous research, and mathematics. This survey synthesizes agentic reasoning methods into a unified roadmap bridging thought and action, and outlines open challenges and future directions, including personalization, long-horizon interaction, world modeling, scalable multi-agent training, and governance for real-world deployment.

SmartSnap: Proactive Evidence Seeking for Self-Verifying Agents

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) holds great promise for the development of autonomous agents under complex GUI tasks, but its scalability remains severely hampered by the verification of task completion. Existing task verification is treated as a passive, post-hoc process: a verifier (i.e., rule-based scoring script, reward or critic model, and LLM-as-a-Judge) analyzes the agent's entire interaction trajectory to determine if the agent succeeds. Such processing of verbose context that contains irrelevant, noisy history poses challenges to the verification protocols and therefore leads to prohibitive cost and low reliability. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose SmartSnap, a paradigm shift from this passive, post-hoc verification to proactive, in-situ self-verification by the agent itself. We introduce the Self-Verifying Agent, a new type of agent designed with dual missions: to not only complete a task but also to prove its accomplishment with curated snapshot evidences. Guided by our proposed 3C Principles (Completeness, Conciseness, and Creativity), the agent leverages its accessibility to the online environment to perform self-verification on a minimal, decisive set of snapshots. Such evidences are provided as the sole materials for a general LLM-as-a-Judge verifier to determine their validity and relevance. Experiments on mobile tasks across model families and scales demonstrate that our SmartSnap paradigm allows training LLM-driven agents in a scalable manner, bringing performance gains up to 26.08% and 16.66% respectively to 8B and 30B models. The synergizing between solution finding and evidence seeking facilitates the cultivation of efficient, self-verifying agents with competitive performance against DeepSeek V3.1 and Qwen3-235B-A22B.

tencent Tencent
·
Dec 26, 2025 5

LongCat-Flash-Prover: Advancing Native Formal Reasoning via Agentic Tool-Integrated Reinforcement Learning

We introduce LongCat-Flash-Prover, a flagship 560-billion-parameter open-source Mixture-of- Experts (MoE) model that advances Native Formal Reasoning in Lean4 through agentic tool-integrated reasoning (TIR). We decompose the native formal reasoning task into three independent formal capabilities, i.e., auto-formalization, sketching, and proving. To facilitate these capabilities, we propose a Hybrid-Experts Iteration Framework to expand high-quality task trajectories, including generating a formal statement based on a given informal problem, producing a whole-proof directly from the statement, or a lemma-style sketch. During agentic RL, we present a Hierarchical Importance Sampling Policy Optimization (HisPO) algorithm, which aims to stabilize the MoE model training on such long-horizon tasks. It employs a gradient masking strategy that accounts for the policy staleness and the inherent train-inference engine discrepancies at both sequence and token levels. Additionally, we also incorporate theorem consistency and legality detection mechanisms to eliminate reward hacking issues. Extensive evaluations show that our LongCat-Flash-Prover sets a new state-of-the-art for open-weights models in both auto-formalization and theorem proving. Demonstrating remarkable sample efficiency, it achieves a 97.1% pass rate on MiniF2F-Test using only 72 inference budget per problem. On more challenging benchmarks, it solves 70.8% of ProverBench and 41.5% of PutnamBench with no more than 220 attempts per problem, significantly outperforming existing open-weights baselines.

meituan-longcat LongCat
·
Mar 22 4

Constraining the Commit Boundary: A DIO/ODI-Informed Authorization Guardrail for Agentic Entity Resolution

Agentic Entity Resolution (ER) systems iteratively plan actions, retrieve evidence, revise hypotheses, and propose graph mutations. An erroneous identity hypothesis may condition later retrieval and produce apparent confirmation. This paper proposes a Digital Identity Optimization (DIO) and Ontology of Digital Identity (ODI)-informed authorization boundary between evidence available for agent reasoning and evidence eligible to authorize persistent identity-changing mutations. A domain-governed constraint-binding function maps selected reconstruction-failure distinctions to explicit identity-preserving constraints. An abstract two-phase supervisor permits a commit only when claim-specific authorization-eligible evidence supports every required proposition, relevant conflicts are resolved, the operation remains within its authorized scope, and relevant state and policy versions remain valid. Admission as UNVERIFIED does not confer authorization eligibility. Separate claim-specific promotion governs evidentiary use; insufficient support or unresolved material conflict leads to deferral. The contribution is a specification connecting diagnostic-to-constraint mapping, evidence promotion, proposition coverage, conflict handling, scope binding, and commit-time version integrity. A proposed evaluation protocol is designed to assess the mapping's incremental value beyond generic authorization and conventional identifier rules. This is a conceptual architecture without implementation or empirical validation, not a theorem of semantic correctness. Its property depends on domain-policy adequacy, evidence promotion, and enforcement. It does not prevent erroneous hypotheses or hypothesis-conditioned retrieval; dependency-aware evidence flow remains future research.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 27

AIProver: Agentic Auto-Formalization of Mathematical Research via Certificate-Driven Evolving Harness

Proof auto-formalization translates natural-language (NL) theorems and proofs into a formal language (FL) such as Lean, enabling mechanical verification. Despite rapid progress, research-level proofs often depend on concepts missing from leading proof assistant libraries (e.g., Lean's Mathlib), and successful compilation does not guarantee that a translation preserves the theorem's meaning or the proof's reasoning. Furthermore, aligned NL-FL training data are scarce, and leading agents often rely on costly frontier models and manually engineered harnesses. To address the above issues, we present AIProver, an agentic framework for autonomous proof auto-formalization and proof synthesis (AFPS) that jointly post-trains a 119B open-weight language model and evolves its agentic, tool-calling harness with HarnessEvolve. Verifiers assess type correctness, proof completeness, and semantic correctness, returning rewards and diagnostic certificates that drive model fine-tuning and alternating reinforcement learning via symbolic feedback and HarnessEvolve, a certificate-driven evolutionary search over the whole harness control flow that re-tailors the harness to the updated model. For research-level training and evaluation, we introduce LoCoBench, 58.9k instances from Mathlib, CSLib, Mizar Math Library, and a bounded-arithmetic textbook, with a 771-instance validation split whose theorem-proof pairs have no public Lean formalization. Against 39 frameworks spanning AFPS agents, frontier LLMs, and coding agents, AIProver lifts pass@4 semantic correctness over its Leanstral-1.5 base from 15.7% to 36.7% and outperforms every other open-weight system and Aristotle. As a Claude Code and Codex skill, it lifts their semantic correctness from 41.9% and 34.1% to 79.8% and 62.4%, respectively. Further, it is also 24% cheaper than Numina-Lean-Agent, pushing the accuracy-cost frontier of research-level AFPS.

Sage-A1.5: From Long-Horizon Execution to Scientific Exploration with Capability Composition

In this report, we introduce Sage-A1.5, a 35B Mixture-of-Experts agentic model that builds on A1 to advance long-horizon problem solving through adaptive capability composition. Compared with A1, Sage-A1.5 learns not only to solve individual tasks, but also to organize work and revise its approach during execution. Sage-A1.5 highlights three improvements: agentic orchestration, verification, and open scientific discovery. First, agentic orchestration extends single-agent execution through task delegation and parallel collaboration among subagents with isolated contexts, enabling complex tasks to be decomposed and addressed concurrently and supporting efficient execution while reducing interference across concurrent subagents. Second, agentic verification strengthens long-horizon reliability through progress checking, evidence validation, and reflective strategy revision, allowing the agent to recognize unproductive search paths and pursue alternative approaches. Third, open scientific discovery extends agentic capabilities beyond answering predefined questions to conducting exploratory research, connecting scientific inquiry with interactive analysis and inspectable research artifacts. We showcase these capabilities through complicated agentic tasks and multidisciplinary scientific applications. Besides, we hope Sage-A1.5 provides the community with an accessible foundation for open scientific discovery, offering a practical path from long-horizon task execution to collaborative, verifiable, and inspectable scientific exploration.

Harnessing Code Agents for Automatic Software Verification

Formal verification offers the strongest guarantee of software correctness, but it does not scale: the proofs demanded by interactive theorem provers such as Coq require enormous expert effort. Large language models (LLMs) promise to generate these proofs automatically, yet existing approaches wire a fixed, human-designed proof strategy into the system and constrain the model to follow it (retrieving premises and predicting tactics one step at a time, or splitting goals by divide-and-conquer), and still prove only a fraction of their target theorems. We show that imposing such a strategy is unnecessary and limiting. Handing the whole lemma to a general LLM code agent (for example, Claude Code), free to choose its own approach, and wrapping it in a verification harness is both simpler and more effective, achieving full coverage: every targeted lemma proved, with no failures and no Coq expert intervention. The agent writes the proofs under feedback and hard constraints from the harness that keep each one sound (accepted only when the prover's kernel closes it), complete (no obligation left unproved or silently dropped), and terminating (no divergent tactics). We evaluate this harness plus code agent along three dimensions. (1) Core logic: on Iris, the state-of-the-art separation logic for concurrent and memory-manipulating programs, Aria proves all 4,257 lemmas of the four core modules and the 217 lemmas verifying Rust's standard libraries built on it, fully automatically. (2) Comparison with prior LLM provers: on reglang, where prior provers manage barely one in eight, Aria proves all 318. (3) Generality: on iris-lean, the unfinished Lean 4 port of Iris, it proves 72 not-yet-ported lemmas, showing the approach is not specific to Coq. A state-of-the-art model (Claude Opus 4.7) can write proofs for verified software development fully and automatically.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 6

AgentMath: Empowering Mathematical Reasoning for Large Language Models via Tool-Augmented Agent

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) like o3 and DeepSeek-R1 have achieved remarkable progress in natural language reasoning with long chain-of-thought. However, they remain computationally inefficient and struggle with accuracy when solving problems requiring complex mathematical operations. In this work, we present AgentMath, an agent framework that seamlessly integrates language models' reasoning capabilities with code interpreters' computational precision to efficiently tackle complex mathematical problems. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1) An automated method that converts natural language chain-of-thought into structured tool-augmented trajectories, generating high-quality supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data to alleviate data scarcity; (2) A novel agentic reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm that dynamically interleaves natural language generation with real-time code execution. This enables models to autonomously learn optimal tool-use strategies through multi-round interactive feedback, while fostering emergent capabilities in code refinement and error correction; (3) An efficient training system incorporating innovative techniques, including request-level asynchronous rollout scheduling, agentic partial rollout, and prefix-aware weighted load balancing, achieving 4-5x speedup and making efficient RL training feasible on ultra-long sequences with scenarios with massive tool invocation. The evaluations show that AgentMath achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging mathematical competition benchmarks including AIME24, AIME25, and HMMT25. Specifically, AgentMath-30B-A3B attains 90.6%, 86.4%, and 73.8% accuracy respectively, achieving advanced performance. The results validate the effectiveness of our approach and pave the way for building more sophisticated and scalable mathematical reasoning agents.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 23, 2025

Towards Solving More Challenging IMO Problems via Decoupled Reasoning and Proving

Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) in formal languages is a foundational challenge for AI. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven remarkable progress, a significant gap remains between their powerful informal reasoning capabilities and their weak formal proving performance. Recent studies show that the informal accuracy exceeds 80% while formal success remains below 8% on benchmarks like PutnamBench. We argue this gap persists because current state-of-the-art provers, by tightly coupling reasoning and proving, are trained with paradigms that inadvertently punish deep reasoning in favor of shallow, tactic-based strategies. To bridge this fundamental gap, we propose a novel framework that decouples high-level reasoning from low-level proof generation. Our approach utilizes two distinct, specialized models: a powerful, general-purpose Reasoner to generate diverse, strategic subgoal lemmas, and an efficient Prover to rigorously verify them. This modular design liberates the model's full reasoning potential and bypasses the pitfalls of end-to-end training. We evaluate our method on a challenging set of post-2000 IMO problems, a problem set on which no prior open-source prover has reported success. Our decoupled framework successfully solves 5 of these problems, demonstrating a significant step towards automated reasoning on exceptionally difficult mathematical challenges. To foster future research, we release our full dataset of generated and verified lemmas for a wide range of IMO problems, available at https://tencent-imo.github.io/ .

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 7, 2025 1

From Prompt-Response to Goal-Directed Systems: The Evolution of Agentic AI Software Architecture

Agentic AI denotes an architectural transition from stateless, prompt-driven generative models toward goal-directed systems capable of autonomous perception, planning, action, and adaptation through iterative control loops. This paper examines this transition by connecting foundational intelligent agent theories, including reactive, deliberative, and Belief-Desire-Intention models, with contemporary LLM-centric approaches such as tool invocation, memory-augmented reasoning, and multi-agent coordination. The paper presents three primary contributions: (i) a reference architecture for production-grade LLM agents that separates cognitive reasoning from execution using typed tool interfaces; (ii) a taxonomy of multi-agent topologies, together with their associated failure modes and mitigation approaches; and (iii) an enterprise hardening checklist that incorporates governance, observability, and reproducibility considerations. Through an analysis of emerging industry platforms, including Kore.ai, Salesforce Agentforce, TrueFoundry, ZenML, and LangChain, the study identifies a convergence toward standardized agent loops, registries, and auditable control mechanisms. It is argued that the subsequent phase of agentic AI development will parallel the maturation of web services, relying on shared protocols, typed contracts, and layered governance structures to support scalable and composable autonomy. The persistent challenges related to verifiability, interoperability, and safe autonomy remain key areas for future research and practical deployment.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 10

Thinking Before Thinking: Scaling Agentic Inference Through Meta-Reasoning

As agents take on longer and more complex problems, controlling the execution becomes a task in its own right. Each step in the run brings new control choices, like which partial work to build on, whether to start fresh, or when to stop. We introduce agentic meta-reasoning, an inference-time harness that makes these choices an explicit and structured reasoning process. Workers carry out the task-level computation, while a controller consolidates what the run has established, explores next options, assesses what each option is worth under the remaining budget, and dispatches the chosen work with context drawn from persistent memory. Between decisions the controller carries only a compact account of the run rather than replaying its full history. Our baselines span production coding agents and research harnesses, together with a Direct Control Agent using the same workers and compute budget allowance. On ProgramBench, which tests long-horizon agentic capability through program reconstruction, meta-reasoning achieves 71.5% with GPT-5.5 against 58.0% for Codex; with Opus 4.8 it achieves 67.2% against 65.5% for Claude Code. On the other benchmarks, spanning abstract reasoning, multi-domain long-horizon reasoning, and proof generation, it gains between 3.6 and 4.2 points over direct control, averaged across three frontier models. It keeps improving over the tested budget ranges where direct control plateaus, though its overhead can hurt at small budgets. Artifact-graph analysis reveals more reuse of earlier work, higher coverage of correct solutions in most settings, and nonuniform gains in final selection. These results indicate that spending computation on structured control becomes more important as agents scale to longer runs.

  • 12 authors
·
Sep 28

Chain-of-Agents: End-to-End Agent Foundation Models via Multi-Agent Distillation and Agentic RL

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and multi-agent systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex problem-solving tasks such as deep research, vibe coding, and mathematical reasoning. However, most existing multi-agent systems are built upon manual prompt/workflow engineering with sophisticated agent frameworks, making them computationally inefficient, less capable, and can not benefit from data-centric learning. In this work, we introduce Chain-of-Agents (CoA), a novel paradigm of LLM reasoning that enables native end-to-end complex problem-solving in the same way as a multi-agent system (i.e., multi-turn problem solving with multiple tools and multiple agents) within one model. In chain-of-agents problem-solving, the model dynamically activates different tool agents and role-playing agents to simulate multi-agent collaboration in an end-to-end fashion. To elicit end-to-end chain-of-agents problem-solving abilities in LLMs, we introduce a multi-agent distillation framework to distill state-of-the-art multi-agent systems into chain-of-agents trajectories for agentic supervised fine-tuning. We then use agentic reinforcement learning on verifiable agentic tasks to further improve the models' capabilities on chain-of-agents problem solving. We call the resulting models Agent Foundation Models (AFMs). Our empirical studies demonstrate that AFM establishes new state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks in both web agent and code agent settings. We make the entire research, including the model weights, code for training and evaluation, and the training data, fully open-sourced, which offers a solid starting point for future research on agent models and agentic RL.

  • 30 authors
·
Aug 6, 2025 9

OPTAGENT: Optimizing Multi-Agent LLM Interactions Through Verbal Reinforcement Learning for Enhanced Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities in mathematical and scientific tasks. To enhance complex reasoning, multi-agent systems have been proposed to harness the collective intelligence of LLM agents. However, existing collaboration structures are either predefined or rely on majority voting or round-table debates, which can suppress correct but less dominant agent contributions. Recent approaches model multi-agent systems as graph networks but optimize purely for agent performance, neglecting the quality of interactions. We hypothesize that effective agent communication is crucial for multi-agent reasoning and that debating quality plays a significant role. To address this, we propose ours, a multi-agent verbal reinforcement learning algorithm that dynamically constructs and refines multi-agent collaboration structures. Our method defines action spaces and a feedback mechanism that evaluates communication robustness and coherence throughout the debate. The final decision is achieved through a majority vote over all the agents. We assess ours on various reasoning tasks, including mathematical reasoning, creative writing, scientific reasoning, and numerical sorting. Results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms single-agent prompting methods and state-of-the-art multi-agent frameworks on diverse tasks.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 20, 2025

A Case Study on Emergent Cheating and Whistleblowing in Autonomous Research Swarms

Multi-agent AI science ecosystems rely on agents possessing tools that allow them to communicate, coordinate, and build on each other's work. Yet this shared infrastructure can also introduce vulnerabilities by creating a substrate for the contagious spread of unintended and undesirable behaviors. We report a case study on a research collective of 100 autonomous LLM agents tasked with proving formal mathematical conjectures. Within the swarm, cheating spontaneously emerged and was later challenged by whistleblowers - both without any external intervention. When a single agent discovered an exploit in the evaluation system, it propagated across the collective via a shared knowledge library and later through peer-to-peer messages. Despite early reluctance, a cohort of agents adopted the exploit in response to competitive pressure. A separate group of agents produced an emergent counter-response: auditing fraudulent proofs, alerting peers across broadcast and private channels, staging boycotts, lodging formal complaints, and proposing validation patches. In recent incidents, agent swarms coordinated covertly through improvised side-channels (Dalton and Wallace, 2026; Greenblatt et al., 2026). Our setting differs: the same transparent channels that carried the exploit also gave non-cheating agents the visibility they needed to detect fraud, organize resistance, and enforce norms. We cast the problem of managing the agents' shared infrastructure as the knowledge commons governance problem (Ostrom, 1990). To protect the commons from exploits, we propose to adopt institutional mechanisms, such as graduated sanctioning and collective-choice rules, to support decentralized self-governance in autonomous swarms.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 2

VeriHarness: Scaling Agentic Verification for Long-Horizon Tasks

As LLM agents undertake increasingly complex, long-horizon tasks, verifying their outputs becomes increasingly challenging. We study how verification capability can be strengthened with a fixed base model, without access to reference answers or grading rubrics at test time. Repeated sampling yields multiple rollouts that can contain complementary correct claims, but we need a reliable verification mechanism to determine which claims to trust. We first find that disagreement often exposes correct alternatives, while consensus can conceal errors. These observations motivate VeriHarness, which turns the underlying LLM a generator uses into an agentic verifier by giving it a workspace, evidence tools, and reusable verification skills. A disagreement resolver checks competing claims against environmental evidence, while a consensus challenger tests shared claims and searches for omitted requirements. Their findings guide the selection and revision of the final artifact. Across five long-horizon workspace benchmarks and two frontier models, VeriHarness achieves the highest selection scores among the evaluated baselines. Evidence-backed revision further improves average performance, bringing gains over a single rollout to 6.2 points with Gemini 3.5 Flash and 6.4 points with Claude Opus 4.8. We further show that verification skills can self-improve from failure feedback, demonstrating VeriHarness as a novel and critical approach for scaling long-horizon agentic verification. We release the full pool of approximately 26,000 rollouts across all five benchmarks and both models, produced at a cost of over $100,000, to support future research on agentic verification.

google Google
·
Sep 30 3

Clueing up LLMs with Tool-Augmented Deductive Reasoning

Despite recent advances in large language models (LLMs), performing logically consistent deductive reasoning over extended interactions remains challenging. Tasks that require integrating evidence across multiple reasoning steps, maintaining consistency with prior inferences, and updating beliefs under new constraints can surface limitations in current models while providing a useful testbed for evaluating reasoning enhancements. In this paper, we implement a text-based, multi-agent version of the classic board game Clue as an environment to evaluate multi-step, agentic deductive reasoning. In this setting, agents must infer hidden information from a sequence of observations, maintain consistency across turns, and reason over an evolving set of logical constraints. We instantiate six LLM-based agents (GPT-4o-mini and Gemini-2.5-Flash) as players that engage in turn-based gameplay; using three agents per model family, we establish baseline performance across repeated games. We then introduce a tool-augmented approach in which a structured possibility matrix converts implicit game state from generated reasoning logs into an explicit representation of remaining possibilities. The possibility matrix encodes extended-turn memory and deductive constraints, offloading these tasks from the agent. We compare this approach against the baseline to evaluate how tool augmentation supports reasoning quality and task success for autonomous agents in a strategic reasoning environment.

  • 2 authors
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Sep 15

Vibe Reasoning: Eliciting Frontier AI Mathematical Capabilities -- A Case Study on IMO 2025 Problem 6

We introduce Vibe Reasoning, a human-AI collaborative paradigm for solving complex mathematical problems. Our key insight is that frontier AI models already possess the knowledge required to solve challenging problems -- they simply do not know how, what, or when to apply it. Vibe Reasoning transforms AI's latent potential into manifested capability through generic meta-prompts, agentic grounding, and model orchestration. We demonstrate this paradigm through IMO 2025 Problem 6, a combinatorial optimization problem where autonomous AI systems publicly reported failures. Our solution combined GPT-5's exploratory capabilities with Gemini 3 Pro's proof strengths, leveraging agentic workflows with Python code execution and file-based memory, to derive both the correct answer (2112) and a rigorous mathematical proof. Through iterative refinement across multiple attempts, we discovered the necessity of agentic grounding and model orchestration, while human prompts evolved from problem-specific hints to generic, transferable meta-prompts. We analyze why capable AI fails autonomously, how each component addresses specific failure modes, and extract principles for effective vibe reasoning. Our findings suggest that lightweight human guidance can unlock frontier models' mathematical reasoning potential. This is ongoing work; we are developing automated frameworks and conducting broader evaluations to further validate Vibe Reasoning's generality and effectiveness.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 22, 2025

LiveFMBench: Unveiling the Power and Limits of Agentic Workflows in Specification Generation

Formal specification is essential for rigorous program verification, yet writing correct specifications remains costly and difficult to automate. Although large language models (LLMs) and agents have shown promising progress, their true capabilities and failure modes remain unclear. We present the first systematic and contamination-aware study of LLM- and agent-based formal specification generation for C programs. We introduce LiveFMBench, a continuously evolving benchmark of 630 ACSL (ANSI/ISO C Specification Language)-annotated C programs, including 360 newly collected cases designed to mitigate data leakage. Using this benchmark, we evaluate direct prompting with different sampling sizes, reasoning-enabled (thinking mode) inference, the agentic pipeline, and perform a fine-grained failure analysis. Experimental results reveal that naive evaluation substantially overestimates performance because models under direct prompting may exhibit unfaithful behaviors, such as deceiving automated provers or ignoring code-context constraints; after excluding such cases, the true specification generation accuracy drops by approximately 20\%. We further find that both increased sampling and thinking mode significantly improve success rates, with smaller models benefiting more from thinking mode. Agentic pipelines are particularly effective under low sampling budgets and on harder datasets. Failure analysis further shows that incorrect loop invariants are the dominant error type, while agentic pipelines notably reduce assertion errors. These results expose fundamental limitations in current LLM-based approaches and suggest they remain far from replacing human-authored formal specifications. We release LiveFMBench at https://huggingface.co/datasets/fm-universe/Live-FM-Bench and all evaluation artifacts to support future research.

  • 12 authors
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May 1

h1: A Taste of the Bitter Lesson in Automated Theorem Proving

While progress in informal mathematics has come largely from scaling the chain-of-thought and agentic reasoning of frontier language models, formal theorem proving has increasingly relied on human-designed workflows around these models, such as planning, decomposition, and orchestrating specialized provers. This raises a bitter-lesson question: can a simple agentic loop that scales test-time compute match these workflows? The answer matters as formal verification must scale to keep up with frontier models producing research mathematics, yet new workflows rarely settle it, as their gains are often confounded with stronger models or more compute. We study this question with h1, a simple harness that gives a model an efficient interface to Lean 4 and keeps it working through verifier feedback and self-reflection, without imposing a decomposition or search structure. h1 reaches state-of-the-art results on PutnamBench, FATE-X, and FormalConjectures100-Solved, settles eight open problems in FormalConjectures, and, at matched models, matches or outperforms specialized workflows such as Goedel-Architect and AlphaProof Nexus, surprisingly showing that a single attempt (pass@1) can often scale to solve open problems. Through ablations and matched-model comparisons with Claude Code and AxProverBase, we find that simplicity alone is not enough: an efficient Lean interface largely determines cost and solve rate. We thus recommend that future work evaluate frontier models with efficient execution feedback before prescribing workflows, at the risk of bitter lessons.

meta-llama Meta Llama
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Oct 24 2

AegisLLM: Scaling Agentic Systems for Self-Reflective Defense in LLM Security

We introduce AegisLLM, a cooperative multi-agent defense against adversarial attacks and information leakage. In AegisLLM, a structured workflow of autonomous agents - orchestrator, deflector, responder, and evaluator - collaborate to ensure safe and compliant LLM outputs, while self-improving over time through prompt optimization. We show that scaling agentic reasoning system at test-time - both by incorporating additional agent roles and by leveraging automated prompt optimization (such as DSPy)- substantially enhances robustness without compromising model utility. This test-time defense enables real-time adaptability to evolving attacks, without requiring model retraining. Comprehensive evaluations across key threat scenarios, including unlearning and jailbreaking, demonstrate the effectiveness of AegisLLM. On the WMDP unlearning benchmark, AegisLLM achieves near-perfect unlearning with only 20 training examples and fewer than 300 LM calls. For jailbreaking benchmarks, we achieve 51% improvement compared to the base model on StrongReject, with false refusal rates of only 7.9% on PHTest compared to 18-55% for comparable methods. Our results highlight the advantages of adaptive, agentic reasoning over static defenses, establishing AegisLLM as a strong runtime alternative to traditional approaches based on model modifications. Code is available at https://github.com/zikuicai/aegisllm

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 12, 2025

Stress-Testing the Reasoning Competence of LLMs With Proofs Under Minimal Formalism

We introduce ProofGrid, a benchmark suite for evaluating LLM reasoning through machine-checkable proofs rather than final answers alone. ProofGrid contains 15 tasks spanning proof writing, proof checking, proof masking, and proof gap-filling. Tasks are expressed in minimal formal notation, especially NDL, a compact natural-deduction language that fits in short prompts and supports precise, auditable verification. This yields mechanical, reproducible, and fine-grained evaluation rather than judgments by humans or LLMs. ProofGrid covers a calibrated difficulty spectrum, from foundational reasoning tests to structurally rich challenge tasks that no current model solves, while minimizing reliance on domain knowledge, solver delegation, and long-context artifacts. We also develop a comparative framework for reasoning benchmarks and use it to situate ProofGrid relative to existing work in terms of representation, verification guarantees, and reasoning depth. Methodologically, we introduce an instrumented proof-checking pipeline that tolerates minor surface deviations while locating the first substantive reasoning failure, improving measurement resolution and separating proof planning from low-level execution noise. Using this pipeline, we evaluate a broad range of open and proprietary models. Results show rapid progress but substantial remaining limits: frontier models perform well on several foundational tasks, yet difficult tasks, especially those requiring global combinatorial reasoning or low-level proof synthesis, remain far from solved. We also identify epistemic instability, where models generate flawed proofs yet correctly reject those local inferences in isolation, and formalize this with an Epistemic Stability Index. Finally, we complement accuracy with 2PL IRT analyses, Wright maps, and a normalized task-discrimination measure based on Fisher information.

  • 2 authors
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Apr 6 2

TCSAlgBench: Benchmarking Automated Proving for Research-Level Theoretical Computer Science

Large language models perform strongly on competition mathematics, but their research-level reasoning remains difficult to evaluate systematically. Theoretical computer science (TCS) connects algorithm design to explicit guarantees and fundamental limits, providing a setting for evaluating whether models can justify computational improvements with arguments humans can inspect. We introduce TCSAlgBench, a benchmark and reusable pipeline for natural-language proof discovery, comprising 398 theorem-level challenges from 138 STOC and COLT 2026 papers. Expert-designed rules complete paper-specific context, preserve computational assumptions and quantitative guarantees, and withhold constructions when discovering an algorithm is part of the task. For each task, prover systems receive theorem statements and access to cited prior work. The pipeline supports fresh, versioned challenge batches from newly released papers. We evaluate ten model configurations from four families under direct inference and prover-verifier discussion, and compare four agent workflows under matched model-call opportunities. All evaluations use the full benchmark. In the model comparison, GPT-5.6 Sol max achieves the highest five-run verifier-accepted coverage at 23.6% after 10-round discussion. Discussion and repeated sampling improve coverage. In the separate agent comparison using GPT-5.5 xhigh, decomposition improves coverage over discussion, and agentic planning achieves the highest five-run verifier-accepted coverage at 25.4%. TCSAlgBench provides a refreshable testbed for measuring progress in model reasoning and studying how agent workflows support research-level proof discovery.

  • 10 authors
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Sep 27

Artifact-centered Claim-aware Observability for Autonomous Scientific Agents

Autonomous scientific agents now increasingly propose ideas, write code, run experiments, analyze results, and even draft papers. Observe and audit those agents are necessary but logging every model call is not enough, scientists also need to inspect the artifacts and claims that the systems produced and their relations. This is driven by the fact that failures in scientific agent systems are often distributed across several objects. A manuscript claim may cite the wrong evidence, a search process may select a degenerate candidate, a laboratory novelty claim may depend on an unstated rule, or a multi-agent plan may change without a visible trigger. Existing tracing, experiment tracking, and archival provenance tools are valuable, but their native objects do not make these scientific audit relations first-class. We argue that autonomous scientific systems should emit portable, claim-aware artifact lineage as a minimum audit layer. We propose a compact observability profile organized around individuals, operators, fitness records, lineage, archives, runs, streams, and steering commands. In this profile, scientific claims are ordinary individuals with explicit evidence bindings and verification records. The profile is intended as a semantic layer that complements current telemetry and provenance standards. Execution details can remain in OpenTelemetry. Final packages can export to PROV-O or RO-Crate standards.

  • 4 authors
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Aug 17

Automated Design of Agentic Systems

Researchers are investing substantial effort in developing powerful general-purpose agents, wherein Foundation Models are used as modules within agentic systems (e.g. Chain-of-Thought, Self-Reflection, Toolformer). However, the history of machine learning teaches us that hand-designed solutions are eventually replaced by learned solutions. We formulate a new research area, Automated Design of Agentic Systems (ADAS), which aims to automatically create powerful agentic system designs, including inventing novel building blocks and/or combining them in new ways. We further demonstrate that there is an unexplored yet promising approach within ADAS where agents can be defined in code and new agents can be automatically discovered by a meta agent programming ever better ones in code. Given that programming languages are Turing Complete, this approach theoretically enables the learning of any possible agentic system: including novel prompts, tool use, control flows, and combinations thereof. We present a simple yet effective algorithm named Meta Agent Search to demonstrate this idea, where a meta agent iteratively programs interesting new agents based on an ever-growing archive of previous discoveries. Through extensive experiments across multiple domains including coding, science, and math, we show that our algorithm can progressively invent agents with novel designs that greatly outperform state-of-the-art hand-designed agents. Importantly, we consistently observe the surprising result that agents invented by Meta Agent Search maintain superior performance even when transferred across domains and models, demonstrating their robustness and generality. Provided we develop it safely, our work illustrates the potential of an exciting new research direction toward automatically designing ever-more powerful agentic systems to benefit humanity.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 15, 2024 3

AgenticSimLaw: A Juvenile Courtroom Multi-Agent Debate Simulation for Explainable High-Stakes Tabular Decision Making

We introduce AgenticSimLaw, a role-structured, multi-agent debate framework that provides transparent and controllable test-time reasoning for high-stakes tabular decision-making tasks. Unlike black-box approaches, our courtroom-style orchestration explicitly defines agent roles (prosecutor, defense, judge), interaction protocols (7-turn structured debate), and private reasoning strategies, creating a fully auditable decision-making process. We benchmark this framework on young adult recidivism prediction using the NLSY97 dataset, comparing it against traditional chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting across almost 90 unique combinations of models and strategies. Our results demonstrate that structured multi-agent debate provides more stable and generalizable performance compared to single-agent reasoning, with stronger correlation between accuracy and F1-score metrics. Beyond performance improvements, AgenticSimLaw offers fine-grained control over reasoning steps, generates complete interaction transcripts for explainability, and enables systematic profiling of agent behaviors. While we instantiate this framework in the criminal justice domain to stress-test reasoning under ethical complexity, the approach generalizes to any deliberative, high-stakes decision task requiring transparency and human oversight. This work addresses key LLM-based multi-agent system challenges: organization through structured roles, observability through logged interactions, and responsibility through explicit non-deployment constraints for sensitive domains. Data, results, and code will be available on github.com under the MIT license.

  • 3 authors
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Jan 28

Diagnosing Failure Root Causes in Platform-Orchestrated Agentic Systems: Dataset, Taxonomy, and Benchmark

Agentic systems consisting of multiple LLM-driven agents coordinating through tools and structured interactions, are increasingly deployed for complex reasoning and problem-solving tasks. At the same time, emerging low-code and template-based agent development platforms (e.g., Dify) enable users to rapidly build and orchestrate agentic systems, which we refer to as platform-orchestrated agentic systems. However, these systems are also fragile and it remains unclear how to systematically identify their potential failure root cause. This paper presents a study of root cause identification of these platform-orchestrated agentic systems. To support this initiative, we construct a dataset AgentFail containing 307 failure logs from ten agentic systems, each with fine-grained annotations linking failures to their root causes. We additionally utilize counterfactual reasoning-based repair strategy to ensure the reliability of the annotation. Building on the dataset, we develop a taxonomy that characterizes failure root causes and analyze their distribution across different platforms and task domains. Furthermore, we introduce a benchmark that leverages LLMs for automatically identifying root causes, in which we also utilize the proposed taxonomy as guidance for LLMs. Results show that the taxonomy can largely improve the performance, thereby confirming its utility. Nevertheless, the accuracy of root cause identification reaches at most 33.6%, which indicates that this task still remains challenging. In light of these results, we also provide actionable guidelines for building such agentic systems. In summary, this paper provides a reliable dataset of failure root cause for platform-orchestrated agentic systems, corresponding taxonomy and benchmark, which serves as a foundation for advancing the development of more reliable agentic systems.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 28, 2025

Vero: Can AI Agents Build Formally Verified Software Repositories?

AI agents are increasingly used for programming, but do not provide any guarantee on the correctness of generated code. Verified code generation, in which an agent produces both an implementation and a machine-checked proof of its specification, offers a stronger path toward trustworthy AI-generated software. Existing benchmarks in this direction either focus on individual functions or only evaluate proof generation with provided implementations. It is still an open question whether agents can make coherent implementation and proof choices across real multi-module codebases. To bridge this gap, we introduce Vero, the first benchmark to evaluate joint implementation and proof synthesis at the repository level. Vero contains 43 multi-module instances sourced from real-world repositories spanning Python, Dafny, Verus, and Coq, and covering diverse domains from cryptographic protocols to distributed systems. Each instance consists of a multi-module Lean 4 repository with predetermined API interfaces, manually curated formal specifications, and reference implementations, supporting both proof-only and code-and-proof evaluation modes. To improve benchmark reliability, Vero also includes an audit mechanism where agents are allowed to formally prove unsatisfiability of provided specification or incorrectness of reference code, which surfaces and corrects latent code and specification errors during curation. We evaluate frontier coding-agent configurations with Lean toolchain access. The strongest agent fully solves only 27 of 43 instances and closes no specifications on the hardest repositories. Vero provides a concrete testbed for measuring progress toward repository-scale verified software synthesis, where current agents still fall short. We release the benchmark, curation pipeline, and evaluation harness at https://github.com/sunblaze-ucb/vero.

  • 11 authors
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Aug 12

Agentic Synthesis against Counterexample-Supplemented Sketches

Coding agents can fix a failing example without preserving the domain rule that made it fail, so later generations can repeat the same plausible mistake. We present agentic synthesis against counterexample-supplemented sketches, a repository-native method for systems whose governing policy is discovered during implementation. A human starts with a partial, code-shaped sketch, and a coding agent generates the first implementation. When a concrete failure exposes missing or mistaken policy, an operator explicitly approves the corrected behavior and rule. The agent then revises the sketch and repairs or regenerates code and prompt surfaces for that one counterexample. The full archive preserves provenance; a selected regression set gates each revision before the next candidate is revealed; and periodic clean regeneration tests whether the evolved sketch, rather than prompt history or accumulated examples, carries the learned policy. We demonstrate the method with CatSynth, a synthetic browser application and captured coding-agent experiment. In one open-world run with GPT-5.4-mini, 8 of 14 frozen candidate cases became counterexamples. The rebuild controls inherited that promotion schedule, and all three paths passed the 8 accepted cases. Rebuilding from the evolved sketch passed 19 of 21 withheld cases, compared with 15 of 21 when rebuilding from the initial sketch and replaying all accepted examples. Retaining code across counterexamples required 9 Developer calls and 719 lines of cumulative artifact churn, versus 15 calls and 2,394 lines for replay-all, and passed 18 of 21 withheld cases. These results provide inspectable evidence that the evolved sketch carried reviewed policy and that retaining code reduced rework in this run; with one model and one reveal order, they do not establish general superiority or correctness beyond the encoded checks.

  • 2 authors
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Jul 16

The Agentic Scientist: Orchestrating Coding Agents for Automated Scientific (Co-)Discovery

Modern coding agents are fundamentally reshaping the role of human input for computational research: they write code, launch in silico experiments, analyze their results, and autonomously operate with ever-increasing time horizons. Despite these developments, fully autonomous research agents suffer from a limited ideation radius and myopic hill-climbing search dynamics. To bridge this gap, we introduce The Agentic Scientist, an end-to-end distributed pipeline for human researchers to conduct computational research alongside modern coding agents. Building on its predecessor, our system decomposes research into task drafting, idea generation, planning, sandboxed experimentation, result aggregation, baseline and ablation construction, post-hoc analysis, and report writing. Importantly, each step in the pipeline is powered by the next generation of coding agents and leverages agentic self-verification. The overall research process is driven by a meta-controller that manages parallel research agents and enforces rubric verification at each stage. This design enables the same orchestration layer to be reused across heterogeneous domains with different execution environments, agentic coding harnesses, and evaluation metrics. Our system can be used across a spectrum of autonomy: either as a co-scientist tool or to perform end-to-end scientific investigation. Within the co-scientist setting, we leveraged a development version of our system to submit a single research paper, which got accepted for publication at ALIFE 2026. We further apply The Agentic Scientist fully autonomously to open problem-solving tasks in machine learning, and demonstrate the system's capability of scientific discovery across different domains of computational research. Our ablations suggest that reliable scientific autonomy depends not only on base model capabilities, but also on the cross-agent orchestration layer.

  • 5 authors
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Oct 12

TaoBench: Do Automated Theorem Prover LLMs Generalize Beyond MathLib?

Automated theorem proving (ATP) benchmarks largely consist of problems formalized in MathLib, so current ATP training and evaluation are heavily biased toward MathLib's definitional framework. However, frontier mathematics is often exploratory and prototype-heavy, relying on bespoke constructions that deviate from standard libraries. In this work, we evaluate the robustness of current ATP systems when applied to a novel definitional framework, specifically examining the performance gap between standard library problems and bespoke mathematical constructions. We introduce TaoBench, an undergraduate-level benchmark derived from Terence Tao's Analysis I, which formalizes analysis by constructing core mathematical concepts from scratch, without relying on standard Mathlib definitions, as well as by mixing from-scratch and MathLib constructions. For fair evaluation, we build an agentic pipeline that automatically extracts a compilable, self-contained local environment for each problem. To isolate the effect of definitional frameworks, we additionally translate every problem into a mathematically equivalent Mathlib formulation, yielding paired TaoBench-Mathlib statements for direct comparison. While state-of-the-art ATP models perform capably within the MathLib framework, performance drops by an average of roughly 26% on the definitionally equivalent Tao formulation. This indicates that the main bottleneck is limited generalization across definitional frameworks rather than task difficulty. TaoBench thus highlights a gap between benchmark performance and applicability, and provides a concrete foundation for developing and testing provers better aligned with research mathematics.

  • 13 authors
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Mar 13

AgenticMath: Enhancing LLM Reasoning via Agentic-based Math Data Generation

The creation of high-quality datasets to improve Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning remains a significant challenge, as current methods often suffer from generating low-quality/incorrect answers and limited information richness from available data sources. To address this, we propose AgenticMath, a novel agentic pipeline for generating high-quality mathematical question-answer pairs to enhance the supervised fine-tuning of LLMs. Our method operates through four stages: (1) Seed Question Filter that selects questions with high information richness, complexity, and clarity; (2) an Agentic Question Rephrase step that employs a multi-agent system to generate diverse, logically consistent paraphrases; (3) an Answer Augment step where rewrite answers using chain-of-thought reasoning to enhance numerical and logical correctness, without reliance on human-provided labels; and (4) a final Question and Answer Evaluation that retains only the most superior pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, fine-tuning 3B-8B parameter LLMs on AgenticMath generated datasets (comprising only 30-60K math samples) achieves competitive or superior performance on diverse in domain and out-of-domain mathematical reasoning benchmarks compared to baselines trained on much more data (e.g., 400K or 2.3M samples). Our work demonstrates that targeted, high-quality data generation is a more efficient path to improving mathematical reasoning in LLMs than large-scale, low-quality alternatives.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 22, 2025

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

Reviving DSP for Advanced Theorem Proving in the Era of Reasoning Models

Recent advancements, such as DeepSeek-Prover-V2-671B and Kimina-Prover-Preview-72B, demonstrate a prevailing trend in leveraging reinforcement learning (RL)-based large-scale training for automated theorem proving. Surprisingly, we discover that even without any training, careful neuro-symbolic coordination of existing off-the-shelf reasoning models and tactic step provers can achieve comparable performance. This paper introduces DSP+, an improved version of the Draft, Sketch, and Prove framework, featuring a fine-grained and integrated neuro-symbolic enhancement for each phase: (1) In the draft phase, we prompt reasoning models to generate concise natural-language subgoals to benefit the sketch phase, removing thinking tokens and references to human-written proofs; (2) In the sketch phase, subgoals are autoformalized with hypotheses to benefit the proving phase, and sketch lines containing syntactic errors are masked according to predefined rules; (3) In the proving phase, we tightly integrate symbolic search methods like Aesop with step provers to establish proofs for the sketch subgoals. Experimental results show that, without any additional model training or fine-tuning, DSP+ solves 80.7\%, 32.8\%, and 24 out of 644 problems from miniF2F, ProofNet, and PutnamBench, respectively, while requiring fewer budgets compared to state-of-the-arts. DSP+ proves imo\_2019\_p1, an IMO problem in miniF2F that is not solved by any prior work. Additionally, DSP+ generates proof patterns comprehensible by human experts, facilitating the identification of formalization errors; For example, eight wrongly formalized statements in miniF2F are discovered. Our results highlight the potential of classical reasoning patterns besides the RL-based training. All components will be open-sourced.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 13, 2025

AgenticRAGTracer: A Hop-Aware Benchmark for Diagnosing Multi-Step Retrieval Reasoning in Agentic RAG

With the rapid advancement of agent-based methods in recent years, Agentic RAG has undoubtedly become an important research direction. Multi-hop reasoning, which requires models to engage in deliberate thinking and multi-step interaction, serves as a critical testbed for assessing such capabilities. However, existing benchmarks typically provide only final questions and answers, while lacking the intermediate hop-level questions that gradually connect atomic questions to the final multi-hop query. This limitation prevents researchers from analyzing at which step an agent fails and restricts more fine-grained evaluation of model capabilities. Moreover, most current benchmarks are manually constructed, which is both time-consuming and labor-intensive, while also limiting scalability and generalization. To address these challenges, we introduce AgenticRAGTracer, the first Agentic RAG benchmark that is primarily constructed automatically by large language models and designed to support step-by-step validation. Our benchmark spans multiple domains, contains 1,305 data points, and has no overlap with existing mainstream benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that even the best large language models perform poorly on our dataset. For instance, GPT-5 attains merely 22.6\% EM accuracy on the hardest portion of our dataset. Hop-aware diagnosis reveals that failures are primarily driven by distorted reasoning chains -- either collapsing prematurely or wandering into over-extension. This highlights a critical inability to allocate steps consistent with the task's logical structure, providing a diagnostic dimension missing in traditional evaluations. We believe our work will facilitate research in Agentic RAG and inspire further meaningful progress in this area. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/YqjMartin/AgenticRAGTracer.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 22

From AI for Science to Agentic Science: A Survey on Autonomous Scientific Discovery

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping scientific discovery, evolving from specialized computational tools into autonomous research partners. We position Agentic Science as a pivotal stage within the broader AI for Science paradigm, where AI systems progress from partial assistance to full scientific agency. Enabled by large language models (LLMs), multimodal systems, and integrated research platforms, agentic AI shows capabilities in hypothesis generation, experimental design, execution, analysis, and iterative refinement -- behaviors once regarded as uniquely human. This survey provides a domain-oriented review of autonomous scientific discovery across life sciences, chemistry, materials science, and physics. We unify three previously fragmented perspectives -- process-oriented, autonomy-oriented, and mechanism-oriented -- through a comprehensive framework that connects foundational capabilities, core processes, and domain-specific realizations. Building on this framework, we (i) trace the evolution of AI for Science, (ii) identify five core capabilities underpinning scientific agency, (iii) model discovery as a dynamic four-stage workflow, (iv) review applications across the above domains, and (v) synthesize key challenges and future opportunities. This work establishes a domain-oriented synthesis of autonomous scientific discovery and positions Agentic Science as a structured paradigm for advancing AI-driven research.

  • 22 authors
·
Aug 18, 2025 2

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

Project Ariadne: A Structural Causal Framework for Auditing Faithfulness in LLM Agents

As Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly tasked with high-stakes autonomous decision-making, the transparency of their reasoning processes has become a critical safety concern. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting allows agents to generate human-readable reasoning traces, it remains unclear whether these traces are faithful generative drivers of the model's output or merely post-hoc rationalizations. We introduce Project Ariadne, a novel XAI framework that utilizes Structural Causal Models (SCMs) and counterfactual logic to audit the causal integrity of agentic reasoning. Unlike existing interpretability methods that rely on surface-level textual similarity, Project Ariadne performs hard interventions (do-calculus) on intermediate reasoning nodes -- systematically inverting logic, negating premises, and reversing factual claims -- to measure the Causal Sensitivity (φ) of the terminal answer. Our empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art models reveals a persistent Faithfulness Gap. We define and detect a widespread failure mode termed Causal Decoupling, where agents exhibit a violation density (ρ) of up to 0.77 in factual and scientific domains. In these instances, agents arrive at identical conclusions despite contradictory internal logic, proving that their reasoning traces function as "Reasoning Theater" while decision-making is governed by latent parametric priors. Our findings suggest that current agentic architectures are inherently prone to unfaithful explanation, and we propose the Ariadne Score as a new benchmark for aligning stated logic with model action.

Demystifying Reinforcement Learning in Agentic Reasoning

Recently, the emergence of agentic RL has showcased that RL could also effectively improve the agentic reasoning ability of LLMs, yet the key design principles and optimal practices remain unclear. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic investigation to demystify reinforcement learning in agentic reasoning from three key perspectives: data, algorithm, and reasoning mode. We highlight our key insights: (i) Replacing stitched synthetic trajectories with real end-to-end tool-use trajectories yields a far stronger SFT initialization; high-diversity, model-aware datasets sustain exploration and markedly improve RL performance. (ii) Exploration-friendly techniques are crucial for agentic RL, such as clip higher, overlong reward shaping, and maintaining adequate policy entropy could improve the training efficiency. (iii) A deliberative strategy with fewer tool calls outperforms frequent tool calls or verbose self-reasoning, improving tool efficiency and final accuracy. Together, these simple practices consistently enhance agentic reasoning and training efficiency, achieving strong results on challenging benchmarks with smaller models, and establishing a practical baseline for future agentic RL research. Beyond these empirical insights, we further contribute a high-quality, real end-to-end agentic SFT dataset along with a high-quality RL dataset, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our insights in boosting the agentic reasoning ability of LLMs across four challenging benchmarks, including AIME2024/AIME2025, GPQA-Diamond, and LiveCodeBench-v6. With our recipes, 4B-sized models could also achieve superior agentic reasoning performance compared to 32B-sized models. Code and models: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/Open-AgentRL

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 13, 2025 2

Verifiable Process Rewards for Agentic Reasoning

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has improved the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), but most existing approaches rely on sparse outcome-level feedback. This sparsity creates a credit assignment challenge in long-horizon agentic reasoning: a trajectory may fail despite containing many correct intermediate decisions, or succeed despite containing flawed ones. In this work, we study a class of densely-verifiable agentic reasoning problems, where intermediate actions can be objectively checked by symbolic or algorithmic oracles. We propose Verifiable Process Rewards (VPR), a framework that converts such oracles into dense turn-level supervision for reinforcement learning, and instantiate it in three representative settings: search-based verification for dynamic deduction, constraint-based verification for logical reasoning, and posterior-based verification for probabilistic inference. We further provide a theoretical analysis showing that dense verifier-grounded rewards can improve long-horizon credit assignment by providing more localized learning signals, with the benefit depending on the reliability of the verifier. Empirically, VPR outperforms outcome-level reward and rollout-based process reward baselines across controlled environments, and more importantly, transfers to both general and agentic reasoning benchmarks, suggesting that verifiable process supervision can foster general reasoning skills applicable beyond the training environments. Our results indicate that VPR is a promising approach for enhancing LLM agents whenever reliable intermediate verification is available, while also highlighting its dependence on oracle quality and the open challenge of extending VPR to less structured, open-ended environments.

  • 9 authors
·
May 10 1

Agent Safety Should Be a Runtime Contract

The dominant paradigm treats AI safety as a property to be instilled during model training via RLHF, DPO, or Constitutional AI. We argue this is structurally insufficient for autonomous agents that execute code, mutate files, send messages, and modify databases. Agent safety should be a runtime contract enforced by the harness, and the contract has two complementary faces. The preventive face blocks dangerous actions before they happen via sandboxes, permission gates, output filters, and trajectory monitors. The evidential face requires verifiable proof that good actions actually happened, gating task submission on hard evidence such as test runs, log captures, file diffs, and citation grounding. We ground the position in four lines of public evidence, with row-level protocols and data released in the supplementary JSON files: a survey of 52 documented AI-agent and LLM safety incidents, a false-completion audit with 31 non-contested core cases plus one disputed illustrative case, a trajectory-schema audit of 12 public agent systems and harnesses, and a title-level audit of all 28,560 papers accepted at NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR 2023-2025 showing a pooled 8-12x imbalance between training-time and deployment-time publication. Two prior communities that needed to enforce safety, computer security and the experimental sciences, converged on runtime contracts with both preventive and evidential elements; agentic AI is now under the same pressure. We formalize an Agent Trajectory Schema and Evidence Chain, state a compositional gating proposition based on standard monitor composition, and outline a research agenda. The right unit of safety in agentic AI is the trajectory-with-checkable-evidence, not the model.

  • 4 authors
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Aug 10 2

Revisiting Multi-Agent Debate as Test-Time Scaling: A Systematic Study of Conditional Effectiveness

The remarkable growth in large language model (LLM) capabilities has spurred exploration into multi-agent systems, with debate frameworks emerging as a promising avenue for enhanced problem-solving. These multi-agent debate (MAD) approaches, where agents collaboratively present, critique, and refine arguments, potentially offer improved reasoning, robustness, and diverse perspectives over monolithic models. Despite prior studies leveraging MAD, a systematic understanding of its effectiveness compared to self-agent methods, particularly under varying conditions, remains elusive. This paper seeks to fill this gap by conceptualizing MAD as a test-time computational scaling technique, distinguished by collaborative refinement and diverse exploration capabilities. We conduct a comprehensive empirical investigation comparing MAD with strong self-agent test-time scaling baselines on mathematical reasoning and safety-related tasks. Our study systematically examines the influence of task difficulty, model scale, and agent diversity on MAD's performance. Key findings reveal that, for mathematical reasoning, MAD offers limited advantages over self-agent scaling but becomes more effective with increased problem difficulty and decreased model capability, while agent diversity shows little benefit. Conversely, for safety tasks, MAD's collaborative refinement can increase vulnerability, but incorporating diverse agent configurations facilitates a gradual reduction in attack success through the collaborative refinement process. We believe our findings provide critical guidance for the future development of more effective and strategically deployed MAD systems.

  • 6 authors
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May 28, 2025 1

MAMath-Bench: Process-Aware and Robust Evaluation of Multimodal Multi-Agent Mathematical Reasoning

Mathematical reasoning is a fundamental capability for educational applications of Large Language Models (LLMs), where reliable problem solving requires not only correct answers but also coherent and verifiable reasoning processes. Multi-agent systems (MASs) have shown growing potential in this domain by leveraging collaboration and verification among multiple LLM agents. However, existing evaluations primarily focus on the correctness of final answers in text-only settings, offering limited insight into multimodal reasoning capabilities, the reliability of intermediate reasoning steps, and robustness against reasoning errors. To address these limitations, we introduce MAMath-Bench, a process-aware benchmark designed to evaluate the multimodal mathematical reasoning capabilities of MASs. MAMath-Bench comprises 1,003 problems spanning 11 mathematical categories, multiple difficulty levels, and several modalities, including text, images, and audio. It features fine-grained milestone annotations to evaluate systems across three dimensions: problem-solving correctness, reasoning-process reliability, and robustness to adversarial reasoning-chain perturbations. Our evaluation yields three key findings. First, multi-agent collaboration does not consistently improve final-answer accuracy over strong single LLMs. Second, collaboration can substantially enhance the coverage of intermediate reasoning, but such gains may come at the cost of increased reasoning redundancy. Third, current systems remain vulnerable to adversarial reasoning errors, particularly those involving subtle structural perturbations. The dataset is available at https://github.com/mira-ai-lab/AgentMath.

  • 9 authors
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Oct 17

Proof-or-Stop: Don't Trust the Agent, Trust the Evidence -- Loop Engineering for Verifiable Evidence-Gated Lifecycle Control

Autonomous coding agents increasingly execute multi-step software work, but lifecycle states such as reviewed, tested, DONE, and ready-to-merge remain claims unless supported by current evidence. We present Proof-or-Stop Lifecycle Control, a method that permits lifecycle transitions only when fresh, tracked-source-state-bound, mechanically verifiable evidence satisfies the relevant gate. The method treats agent outputs as claims rather than lifecycle state, and uses proof operationally to mean gate-admissible evidence under a stated trust model, not semantic program correctness. We evaluate an open-source implementation through mechanism tests, a powered control-policy ablation, and operated self-application evidence. The unattended-loop engine passed 10 of 10 scenarios with zero false-DONE, and local-key receipt bundles rejected 18 tamper classes with zero false accepts. In a 9,240-cell ablation, the pre-registered A4 versus A2-prime comparison reduced visible-pass/hidden-fail amplification from 31 of 1,800 injected cells under a compute-budgeted naive loop to 2 of 1,800 under the gated loop, a 1.6 percentage-point improvement in not-amplified rate with a 95 percent confidence interval of [0.8, 2.5]. A near-compute A3 versus A4 comparison, 14 of 1,800 versus 2 of 1,800, indicates that the gain is associated with enforcing review as a lifecycle gate rather than merely adding a reviewer. The self-application corpus contains 565 stories and 1,007 review findings, with 94.8 percent resolved, plus a 68-row high/critical cross-vendor exhibit. These results support Proof-or-Stop as a model-agnostic, host-neutral control layer for deciding which autonomous-agent claims a lifecycle may act on. The evaluation is limited to one model family, 24 ablation tasks, and a self-hosted corpus.

  • 6 authors
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Jul 15

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

Demystifying deep search: a holistic evaluation with hint-free multi-hop questions and factorised metrics

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems and web agents are increasingly evaluated on multi-hop deep search tasks, yet current practice suffers from two major limitations. First, most benchmarks leak the reasoning path in the question text, allowing models to follow surface cues rather than discover reasoning chains autonomously. Second, evaluation is typically reduced to a single pass rate, which collapses diverse behaviours into one score and obscures whether failures stem from inadequate search, poor knowledge use, or inappropriate refusal. To address these issues, we present WebDetective, a benchmark of hint-free multi-hop questions paired with a controlled Wikipedia sandbox that ensures full traceability of model actions, and a holistic evaluation framework that separates search sufficiency, knowledge utilisation, and refusal behaviour. Our evaluation of 25 state-of-the-art models reveals systematic weaknesses across all architectures: models struggle with knowledge utilisation despite having sufficient evidence and demonstrate near-absent appropriate refusal when evidence is lacking. These patterns expose a fundamental gap: today's systems excel at executing given reasoning paths but fail when required to discover them. We develop an agentic workflow, EvidenceLoop, that explicitly targets the challenges our benchmark identifies, incorporating verification loops and systematic evidence tracking that improve both search and synthesis capabilities. This baseline demonstrates that WebDetective's diagnostic framework can guide concrete architectural improvements, establishing our benchmark as a critical tool for developing genuinely autonomous reasoning systems rather than pattern-following agents.

Agentic Design Patterns: A System-Theoretic Framework

With the development of foundation model (FM), agentic AI systems are getting more attention, yet their inherent issues like hallucination and poor reasoning, coupled with the frequent ad-hoc nature of system design, lead to unreliable and brittle applications. Existing efforts to characterise agentic design patterns often lack a rigorous systems-theoretic foundation, resulting in high-level or convenience-based taxonomies that are difficult to implement. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a principled methodology for engineering robust AI agents. We propose two primary contributions: first, a novel system-theoretic framework that deconstructs an agentic AI system into five core, interacting functional subsystems: Reasoning & World Model, Perception & Grounding, Action Execution, Learning & Adaptation, and Inter-Agent Communication. Second, derived from this architecture and directly mapped to a comprehensive taxonomy of agentic challenges, we present a collection of 12 agentic design patterns. These patterns - categorised as Foundational, Cognitive & Decisional, Execution & Interaction, and Adaptive & Learning - offer reusable, structural solutions to recurring problems in agent design. The utility of the framework is demonstrated by a case study on the ReAct framework, showing how the proposed patterns can rectify systemic architectural deficiencies. This work provides a foundational language and a structured methodology to standardise agentic design communication among researchers and engineers, leading to more modular, understandable, and reliable autonomous systems.

  • 7 authors
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Jan 26

Agent0-VL: Exploring Self-Evolving Agent for Tool-Integrated Vision-Language Reasoning

Vision-language agents have achieved remarkable progress in a variety of multimodal reasoning tasks; however, their learning remains constrained by the limitations of human-annotated supervision. Recent self-rewarding approaches attempt to overcome this constraint by allowing models to act as their own critics or reward providers. Yet, purely text-based self-evaluation struggles to verify complex visual reasoning steps and often suffers from evaluation hallucinations. To address these challenges, inspired by recent advances in tool-integrated reasoning, we propose Agent0-VL, a self-evolving vision-language agent that achieves continual improvement with tool-integrated reasoning. Agent0-VL incorporates tool usage not only into reasoning but also into self-evaluation and self-repair, enabling the model to introspect, verify, and refine its reasoning through evidence-grounded analysis. It unifies two synergistic roles within a single LVLM: a Solver that performs multi-turn tool-integrated reasoning, and a Verifier that generates structured feedback and fine-grained self-rewards through tool-grounded critique. These roles interact through a Self-Evolving Reasoning Cycle, where tool-based verification and reinforcement learning jointly align the reasoning and evaluation distributions for stable self-improvement. Through this zero-external-reward evolution, Agent0-VL aligns its reasoning and verification behaviors without any human annotation or external reward models, achieving continual self-improvement. Experiments on geometric problem solving and visual scientific analysis show that Agent0-VL achieves an 12.5% improvement over the base model. Our code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/Agent0/Agent0-VL{this https URL}.

Agentic Proof and Property-Based Testing via Property-Templates in Data-Intensive Computing

As the cost of code generation becomes cheaper with AI, the new bottleneck in software engineering has shifted to intent specification and validation. Overcoming this durability crisis of AI-driven coding requires more than traditional fuzzing: each candidate property must be proven correct over a model and shown to hold on the real implementation, making formal proof and systematic property-based testing (PBT) complementary. However, validating properties this way at scale requires solving two subproblems: verifying candidate properties and operationalizing PBT without AI hallucination. We hypothesize that recurring property patterns, cast as property templates--abstract, parameterized forms with holes--address both at once. This paper investigates recurring property patterns in Apache Spark. In data-intensive scalable computing systems, correctness properties arise from the principles of data partition, computation decomposition, and dataflow computation. For instance, aggregation decomposition relates a global function executed on the entire dataset to a local function followed by a recombiner. We design an agentic, dual-track validation framework that uses property templates to formally verify correctness in the Lean 4 theorem prover and instantiate PBT templates as executable PySpark tests. Our evaluation shows that property templates increase agentic proof engineering success by up to 2.6x (1.6x on average) and reduce proof hallucinations by 59%. Template-guided PBT synthesis reduces intent misalignments from 22 to 1 and cuts synthesis cost by up to 5.7x (3.8x on average). Template-guided synthesis further exceeds a state-of-the-art Spark fuzzer and approaches unguided LLM-based PBT on code coverage. Finally, comparing the two tracks is informative: when a proof succeeds yet a PBT finds a counterexample, the mismatch identifies a gap between the formal model and implementation.

  • 3 authors
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Jul 9

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
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Jan 22

The Agentic Researcher: A Practical Guide to AI-Assisted Research in Mathematics and Machine Learning

AI tools and agents are reshaping how researchers work, from proving theorems to training neural networks. Yet for many, it remains unclear how these tools fit into everyday research practice. This paper is a practical guide to AI-assisted research in mathematics and machine learning: We discuss how researchers can use modern AI systems productively, where these systems help most, and what kinds of guardrails are needed to use them responsibly. It is organized into three parts: (I) a five-level taxonomy of AI integration, (II) an open-source framework that, through a set of methodological rules formulated as agent prompts, turns CLI coding agents (e.g., Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenCode) into autonomous research assistants, and (III) case studies from deep learning and mathematics. The framework runs inside a sandboxed container, works with any frontier LLM through existing CLI agents, is simple enough to install and use within minutes, and scales from personal-laptop prototyping to multi-node, multi-GPU experimentation across compute clusters. In practice, our longest autonomous session ran for over 20 hours, dispatching independent experiments across multiple nodes without human intervention. We stress that our framework is not intended to replace the researcher in the loop, but to augment them. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZIB-IOL/The-Agentic-Researcher.

  • 4 authors
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Mar 15

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

Let It Flow: Agentic Crafting on Rock and Roll, Building the ROME Model within an Open Agentic Learning Ecosystem

Agentic crafting requires LLMs to operate in real-world environments over multiple turns by taking actions, observing outcomes, and iteratively refining artifacts. Despite its importance, the open-source community lacks a principled, end-to-end ecosystem to streamline agent development. We introduce the Agentic Learning Ecosystem (ALE), a foundational infrastructure that optimizes the production pipeline for agent LLMs. ALE consists of three components: ROLL, a post-training framework for weight optimization; ROCK, a sandbox environment manager for trajectory generation; and iFlow CLI, an agent framework for efficient context engineering. We release ROME (ROME is Obviously an Agentic Model), an open-source agent grounded by ALE and trained on over one million trajectories. Our approach includes data composition protocols for synthesizing complex behaviors and a novel policy optimization algorithm, Interaction-based Policy Alignment (IPA), which assigns credit over semantic interaction chunks rather than individual tokens to improve long-horizon training stability. Empirically, we evaluate ROME within a structured setting and introduce Terminal Bench Pro, a benchmark with improved scale and contamination control. ROME demonstrates strong performance across benchmarks like SWE-bench Verified and Terminal Bench, proving the effectiveness of the ALE infrastructure.

AGI-LAB-HF AGI Lab
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Dec 31, 2025 5

Discovering Agentic Safety Specifications from 1-Bit Danger Signals

Can large language model agents discover hidden safety objectives through experience alone? We introduce EPO-Safe (Experiential Prompt Optimization for Safe Agents), a framework where an LLM iteratively generates action plans, receives sparse binary danger warnings, and evolves a natural language behavioral specification through reflection. Unlike standard LLM reflection methods that rely on rich textual feedback (e.g., compiler errors or detailed environment responses), EPO-Safe demonstrates that LLMs can perform safety reasoning from a strictly impoverished signal in structured, low-dimensional environments: the agent never observes the hidden performance function R^*, only a single bit per timestep indicating that an action was unsafe. We evaluate on five AI Safety Gridworlds (Leike et al., 2017) and five text-based scenario analogs where visible reward R may diverge from R^*. EPO-Safe discovers safe behavior within 1-2 rounds (5-15 episodes), producing human-readable specifications with correct explanatory hypotheses about hazards (e.g., "X cells are directionally hazardous: entering from the north is dangerous"). Critically, we show that standard reward-driven reflection actively degrades safety: agents reflecting on reward alone use the loop to justify and accelerate reward hacking, proving that reflection must be paired with a dedicated safety channel to discover hidden constraints. We further evaluate robustness to noisy oracles: even when 50% of non-dangerous steps produce spurious warnings, mean safety performance degrades by only 15% on average, though sensitivity is environment-dependent, as cross-episode reflection naturally filters inconsistent signals. Each evolved specification functions as an auditable set of grounded behavioral rules discovered autonomously through interaction, rather than authored by humans as in Constitutional AI (Bai et al., 2022).

  • 1 authors
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Apr 24 2

BrokenMath: A Benchmark for Sycophancy in Theorem Proving with LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown strong performance on mathematical benchmarks. At the same time, they are prone to hallucination and sycophancy, often providing convincing but flawed proofs for incorrect mathematical statements provided by users. This significantly limits the applicability of LLMs in theorem proving, as verification of these flawed proofs must be done manually by expert mathematicians. However, existing benchmarks that measure sycophancy in mathematics are limited: they focus solely on final-answer problems, rely on very simple and often contaminated datasets, and construct benchmark samples using synthetic modifications that create ill-posed questions rather than well-posed questions that are demonstrably false. To address these issues, we introduce BrokenMath, the first benchmark for evaluating sycophantic behavior in LLMs within the context of natural language theorem proving. BrokenMath is built from advanced 2025 competition problems, which are perturbed with an LLM to produce false statements and subsequently refined through expert review. Using an LLM-as-a-judge framework, we evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs and agentic systems and find that sycophancy is widespread, with the best model, GPT-5, producing sycophantic answers 29% of the time. We further investigate several mitigation strategies, including test-time interventions and supervised fine-tuning on curated sycophantic examples. These approaches substantially reduce, but do not eliminate, sycophantic behavior.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 6, 2025

Mako: A Self-Evolving Agentic Operating System (SE-AOS) for Autonomous Web Exploitation

We introduce the Self-Evolving Agentic Operating System (SE-AOS): a new class of AI agent that treats exploit capability as a mutable, versioned kernel it extends at runtime, observing its own failures, synthesising new capabilities, proving them against a live target, and hot-loading them back into itself. Mako is the first SE-AOS instance for security research and the autonomous web exploitation engine developed within LaunchSafe. LaunchSafe builds autonomous security agents for continuous offensive testing and agent-driven security research; Mako is the core engine behind that platform. On the public XBOW validation-benchmarks, 104 containerised, CTF-style web applications spanning 26 vulnerability classes across three difficulty tiers, Mako achieves full-suite coverage: it drives every one of the 104 targets to emit a cryptographically fresh, per-build flag, under a verification regime that makes fabricated or memorised results impossible. Our central result is a law of autonomous exploitation: once a capability exists and is discoverable, difficulty collapses; capability, not reasoning, is what is scarce, together with an architecture and formalism that turn that law into a self-improving system. Mako further runs a gated self-evolution loop that proposes, sandboxes, and commits improvements to its own agents and rules when fitness does not regress. We deliberately withhold the operational results, payloads, exploit chains, and tool source, because a system that reduces full-spectrum web exploitation to a repeatable, machine-speed pipeline is dual-use research of concern. We publish the science; we withhold the weapon.

  • 2 authors
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Jul 12

LIMI: Less is More for Agency

We define Agency as the emergent capacity of AI systems to function as autonomous agents actively discovering problems, formulating hypotheses, and executing solutions through self-directed engagement with environments and tools. This fundamental capability marks the dawn of the Age of AI Agency, driven by a critical industry shift: the urgent need for AI systems that don't just think, but work. While current AI excels at reasoning and generating responses, industries demand autonomous agents that can execute tasks, operate tools, and drive real-world outcomes. As agentic intelligence becomes the defining characteristic separating cognitive systems from productive workers, efficiently cultivating machine autonomy becomes paramount. Current approaches assume that more data yields better agency, following traditional scaling laws from language modeling. We fundamentally challenge this paradigm. LIMI (Less Is More for Intelligent Agency) demonstrates that agency follows radically different development principles. Through strategic focus on collaborative software development and scientific research workflows, we show that sophisticated agentic intelligence can emerge from minimal but strategically curated demonstrations of autonomous behavior. Using only 78 carefully designed training samples, LIMI achieves 73.5% on comprehensive agency benchmarks, dramatically outperforming state-of-the-art models: Kimi-K2-Instruct (24.1%), DeepSeek-V3.1 (11.9%), Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct (27.5%), and GLM-4.5 (45.1%). Most strikingly, LIMI demonstrates 53.7% improvement over models trained on 10,000 samples-achieving superior agentic intelligence with 128 times fewer samples. Our findings establish the Agency Efficiency Principle: machine autonomy emerges not from data abundance but from strategic curation of high-quality agentic demonstrations.

  • 21 authors
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Sep 22, 2025 5

CodeAgents: A Token-Efficient Framework for Codified Multi-Agent Reasoning in LLMs

Effective prompt design is essential for improving the planning capabilities of large language model (LLM)-driven agents. However, existing structured prompting strategies are typically limited to single-agent, plan-only settings, and often evaluate performance solely based on task accuracy - overlooking critical factors such as token efficiency, modularity, and scalability in multi-agent environments. To address these limitations, we introduce CodeAgents, a prompting framework that codifies multi-agent reasoning and enables structured, token-efficient planning in multi-agent systems. In CodeAgents, all components of agent interaction - Task, Plan, Feedback, system roles, and external tool invocations - are codified into modular pseudocode enriched with control structures (e.g., loops, conditionals), boolean logic, and typed variables. This design transforms loosely connected agent plans into cohesive, interpretable, and verifiable multi-agent reasoning programs. We evaluate the proposed framework across three diverse benchmarks - GAIA, HotpotQA, and VirtualHome - using a range of representative LLMs. Results show consistent improvements in planning performance, with absolute gains of 3-36 percentage points over natural language prompting baselines. On VirtualHome, our method achieves a new state-of-the-art success rate of 56%. In addition, our approach reduces input and output token usage by 55-87% and 41-70%, respectively, underscoring the importance of token-aware evaluation metrics in the development of scalable multi-agent LLM systems. The code and resources are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CodifyingAgent-5A86

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 3, 2025

Continual Graph Memory for Mathematical Research Agents

Using frontier agent harnesses to tackle mathematical research problems has emerged as an effective means of advancing mathematics. However, solving frontier problems in mathematics may require a massive number of agents working in parallel for extended periods to construct proofs, thereby generating an enormous volume of intermediate proof results. Organizing these intermediate results throughout a long-horizon proof-search process and reusing knowledge gained from prior explorations remain major challenges. We present Ansatz, a mathematical research agent built around Continual Graph Memory, a graph-based, evolvable, cross-problem mathematical research memory system that explicitly organizes the entire proof search process and reuses information from exploration trajectories of previous problems. Specifically, we develop a unified graph memory that represents all intermediate exploration results, including facts, plans, and counterexamples, together with edges that explicitly represent the relationships among them; dependency-aware retrieval supplies precisely targeted local context; an evidence-sensitive curator updates the research frontier and distills lessons from prior attempts; and scoped recall surfaces earlier statements and negative findings for local re-proving rather than uncritical reuse. Experiments cover runs across all ten First Proof Second Batch problems, together with four component studies. Ansatz reports closure on all ten research tasks, demonstrating its ability to sustain and resume long-horizon mathematical search. Beyond these problems, Ansatz also produces solutions to the Jamison caterpillar conjecture and Erdős Problems 289, 348, and 488 without human intervention, and makes partial progress on several open problems, illustrating its strong ability to solve open mathematical research problems.

  • 17 authors
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Oct 1