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Aug 10

VeRA: Verified Reasoning Data Augmentation at Scale

The main issue with most evaluation schemes today is their "static" nature: the same problems are reused repeatedly, allowing for memorization, format exploitation, and eventual saturation. To measure genuine AI progress, we need evaluation that is robust by construction, not by post-hoc detection. In response, we propose VeRA (Verified Reasoning Data Augmentation), a framework that converts benchmark problems into executable specifications, comprising (i) a natural language template with placeholder slots, (ii) a coherent generator that samples valid configurations, and (iii) a deterministic verifier that validates parameters and calculates the corresponding correct answers for each configuration. From a single seed problem, VeRA automatically creates unlimited verified variants with reliable labels at near-zero marginal cost without human involvement. VeRA operates in two complementary modes. VeRA-E (equivalent) rewrites problems while keeping the underlying logic intact, useful for detecting memorization versus genuine reasoning. VeRA-H (hardened) systematically increases complexity while remaining verifiable, enabling reliable creation and labelling of fresh difficult tasks at the boundary of intelligence. Evaluating 16 frontier models with VeRA, we find: (i) VeRA-E improves evaluation quality and reveals contamination patterns. (ii) VeRA-H enables human-free generation of hard tasks with reliable labels. (iii) VeRA establishes verified benchmarks as a general paradigm. VeRA reconceptualizes benchmarks from static objects used until exhausted, to executable specifications generating fresh, verified instances on demand, enhancing robustness and cost-effectiveness for evaluation. With VeRA, we envision that evaluation in any verifiable domain can scale indefinitely without sacrificing label integrity. To stimulate future research, we have open-sourced all code and datasets.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 23

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

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

  • 13 authors
·
May 29, 2025 2

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

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

Verified LLM-Driven Synthesis for Concept Design

Concept Design structures software systems around concepts: user-facing, self-contained units of functionality with a focused purpose. Concepts are composed into applications using synchronization rules called reactions, which specify how actions in one concept trigger actions in others. This paper first gives a formal semantics for concepts and reactions, enabling automatic verification of safety invariants in applications developed with this methodology. It then presents a CEGIS-style, LLM-driven synthesis procedure for generating reaction designs that satisfy such invariants. Because many different designs can satisfy the same invariant, we study two ways of steering synthesis toward the user's intended design: natural-language prompts and positive/negative scenarios. We also propose an LLM-driven scenario elicitation technique to support early design exploration. In an evaluation on three applications and twelve design variants using one LLM configuration, invariant-only synthesis reached verified designs quickly but often produced inconsistent designs across runs, some of which were implausible, showing that invariants alone underconstrain the design task. Scenario-guided synthesis recovered intended designs more consistently than natural-language prompting, although minimal scenarios can lead to overfitting. LLM-driven scenario elicitation, where the user classifies proposed scenarios rather than authoring them from scratch, recovered the intended designs in most variants when enough scenarios were elicited, but missed behaviors and non-determinism prevented reliable coverage in all cases.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 16

Delulu: A Verified Multi-Lingual Benchmark for Code Hallucination Detection in Fill-in-the-Middle Tasks

Large Language Models for code generation frequently produce hallucinations in Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) tasks -- plausible but incorrect completions such as invented API methods, invalid parameters, undefined variables, or non-existent imports. These failures pass superficial review yet introduce runtime errors. We introduce Delulu, a verified multi-lingual benchmark of 1,951 FIM samples across 7 languages and 4 hallucination types. Samples are curated through an adversarial pipeline: a frontier LLM generates plausible hallucinations, four diverse judge models evaluate them, embedding-based clustering mines progressively harder examples, self-contained Docker containers verify that golden completions compile while hallucinated variants produce the expected runtime error, and a final human-expert review removes any remaining biased or trivially decidable samples. We evaluate 11 open-weight FIM models from five families spanning 0.5B-32B parameters: a six-point Qwen2.5-Coder scaling slate, plus a cross-family slate (CodeLlama, DeepSeek-Coder-V2, StarCoder2). The strongest model reaches only 84.5% pass@1, no family exceeds 0.77 Edit Similarity, and every family produces hallucination-aligned completions on a non-trivial share of samples, confirming that the difficulty exposed by Delulu is task-intrinsic rather than family-specific. We release the benchmark, containers, and evaluation framework at https://github.com/microsoft/delulu.

  • 7 authors
·
May 6

TrustGeoGen: Scalable and Formal-Verified Data Engine for Trustworthy Multi-modal Geometric Problem Solving

Mathematical geometric problem solving (GPS) often requires effective integration of multimodal information and verifiable logical coherence. Despite the fast development of large language models in general problem solving, it remains unresolved regarding with both methodology and benchmarks, especially given the fact that exiting synthetic GPS benchmarks are often not self-verified and contain noise and self-contradicted information due to the illusion of LLMs. In this paper, we propose a scalable data engine called TrustGeoGen for problem generation, with formal verification to provide a principled benchmark, which we believe lays the foundation for the further development of methods for GPS. The engine synthesizes geometric data through four key innovations: 1) multimodal-aligned generation of diagrams, textual descriptions, and stepwise solutions; 2) formal verification ensuring rule-compliant reasoning paths; 3) a bootstrapping mechanism enabling complexity escalation via recursive state generation and 4) our devised GeoExplore series algorithms simultaneously produce multi-solution variants and self-reflective backtracking traces. By formal logical verification, TrustGeoGen produces GeoTrust-200K dataset with guaranteed modality integrity, along with GeoTrust-test testset. Experiments reveal the state-of-the-art models achieve only 49.17\% accuracy on GeoTrust-test, demonstrating its evaluation stringency. Crucially, models trained on GeoTrust achieve OOD generalization on GeoQA, significantly reducing logical inconsistencies relative to pseudo-label annotated by OpenAI-o1. Our code is available at https://github.com/Alpha-Innovator/TrustGeoGen

  • 13 authors
·
Apr 22, 2025 2

FactBench: A Dynamic Benchmark for In-the-Wild Language Model Factuality Evaluation

Language models (LMs) are widely used by an increasing number of users, underscoring the challenge of maintaining factuality across a broad range of topics. We first present VERIFY (Verification and Evidence RetrIeval for FactualitY evaluation), a pipeline to evaluate LMs' factuality in real-world user interactions. VERIFY considers the verifiability of LM-generated content and categorizes content units as supported, unsupported, or undecidable based on the retrieved evidence from the Web. Importantly, factuality judgment by VERIFY correlates better with human evaluations than existing methods. Using VERIFY, we identify "hallucination prompts" across diverse topics, i.e., those eliciting the highest rates of incorrect and inconclusive LM responses. These prompts form FactBench, a dataset of 1K prompts across 150 fine-grained topics. Our dataset captures emerging factuality challenges in real-world LM interactions and can be regularly updated with new prompts. We benchmark widely-used LMs from GPT, Gemini, and Llama3.1 family on FactBench, yielding the following key findings: (i) Proprietary models exhibit better factuality, with performance declining from Easy to Hard hallucination prompts. (ii) Llama3.1-405B-Instruct shows comparable or lower factual accuracy than Llama3.1-70B-Instruct across all evaluation methods due to its higher subjectivity that leads to more content labeled as undecidable. (iii) Gemini1.5-Pro shows a significantly higher refusal rate, with over-refusal in 25% of cases. Our code and data are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/launch/factbench.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 29, 2024

HLE-Verified: A Systematic Verification and Structured Revision of Humanity's Last Exam

Humanity's Last Exam (HLE) has become a widely used benchmark for evaluating frontier large language models on challenging, multi-domain questions. However, community-led analyses have raised concerns that HLE contains a non-trivial number of noisy items, which can bias evaluation results and distort cross-model comparisons. To address this challenge, we introduce HLE-Verified, a verified and revised version of HLE with a transparent verification protocol and fine-grained error taxonomy. Our construction follows a two-stage validation-and-repair workflow resulting in a certified benchmark. In Stage I, each item undergoes binary validation of the problem and final answer through domain-expert review and model-based cross-checks, yielding 641 verified items. In Stage II, flawed but fixable items are revised under strict constraints preserving the original evaluation intent, through dual independent expert repairs, model-assisted auditing, and final adjudication, resulting in 1,170 revised-and-certified items. The remaining 689 items are released as a documented uncertain set with explicit uncertainty sources and expertise tags for future refinement. We evaluate seven state-of-the-art language models on HLE and HLE-Verified, observing an average absolute accuracy gain of 7--10 percentage points on HLE-Verified. The improvement is particularly pronounced on items where the original problem statement and/or reference answer is erroneous, with gains of 30--40 percentage points. Our analyses further reveal a strong association between model confidence and the presence of errors in the problem statement or reference answer, supporting the effectiveness of our revisions. Overall, HLE-Verified improves HLE-style evaluations by reducing annotation noise and enabling more faithful measurement of model capabilities. Data is available at: https://github.com/SKYLENAGE-AI/HLE-Verified

skylenage-ai Skylenage
·
Feb 14 3

Single-Rollout Asynchronous Optimization for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) is becoming increasingly important for post-training large language models (LLMs). Previous RL pipelines for LLMs were mostly synchronous and batch-interleaved, which is inefficient for long-horizon agentic tasks. Recently, asynchronous RL has emerged as a more efficient alternative by updating the model as rollouts arrive. However, existing asynchronous RL systems often emphasize throughput, while leaving training stability and task effectiveness largely underexplored. For example, a key challenge is that group-wise sampling in the widely-used GRPO framework does not naturally fit asynchronous agentic training. In this paper, we present Single-rollout Asynchronous Optimization (SAO) to address the stability and off-policy challenges in asynchronous RL. To reduce off-policy effects and improve generalization, we replace group-wise sampling with single-rollout sampling, that is, using one rollout per prompt. We further improve this single-rollout strategy with practical value-model training designs. To improve optimization stability, we introduce a strict double-side token-level clipping strategy. SAO is able to train stably for one thousand steps and consistently outperform GRPO and its variants on agentic coding and reasoning benchmarks, such as SWE-Bench Verified, BeyondAIME, and IMOAnswerBench. We also demonstrate that single-rollout RL is particularly effective in a simulated online learning setting, where the model must adapt to changing evolving environments. To this end, SAO is successfully deployed in the agentic RL pipeline for training the open GLM-5.2 model (750B-A40B).

zai-org Z.ai
·
Jul 7 2

Beyond Survival: Evaluating LLMs in Social Deduction Games with Human-Aligned Strategies

Social deduction games like Werewolf combine language, reasoning, and strategy, providing a testbed for studying natural language and social intelligence. However, most studies reduce the game to LLM-based self-play, yielding templated utterances and anecdotal cases that overlook the richness of social gameplay. Evaluation further relies on coarse metrics such as survival time or subjective scoring due to the lack of quality reference data. To address these gaps, we curate a high-quality, human-verified multimodal Werewolf dataset containing over 100 hours of video, 32.4M utterance tokens, and 15 rule variants. Based on this dataset, we propose a novel strategy-alignment evaluation that leverages the winning faction's strategies as ground truth in two stages: 1) Speech evaluation, formulated as multiple-choice-style tasks that assess whether the model can adopt appropriate stances across five dimensions of social ability; and 2) Decision evaluation, which assesses the model's voting choices and opponent-role inferences. This framework enables a fine-grained evaluation of models' linguistic and reasoning capabilities, while capturing their ability to generate strategically coherent gameplay. Our experiments show that state-of-the-art LLMs show diverse performance, with roughly half remain below 0.50, revealing clear gaps in deception and counterfactual reasoning. We hope our dataset further inspires research on language, reasoning, and strategy in multi-agent interaction.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 13, 2025

Smarter and Cheaper at Once: Byte-Exact KV-Cache Grafting Turns a Frozen Small Model into a Verified-Knowledge Flywheel

We report a way to make a frozen small language model both more capable and dramatically cheaper at once, without changing any weights. Verified knowledge is deposited once as a byte-exact key-value (KV) state artifact and later restored, by graft, into a fresh inference context. The restore is bit-exact: under a pinned deterministic configuration, the grafted logits are byte-for-byte identical to a fresh computation (SHA-256 equality), with zero KL divergence and 100% argmax agreement over fifty samples. We show that own-position graft is the unique numerically exact operating point on a model with floating-point rotary encoding, and we verify byte-exactness on two model scales (12B, 31B) and two GPU targets, one through a pre-registered replay. On AIME 2025, a frozen Gemma-4-12B moves from 80.0% to 93.3% once a verified solution library is grafted, above its own 77.5% and its 31B sibling's 89.2% published anchors. On the recurring case, eight problems the base model never solves within a 401,026-token budget are answered from cached verified solutions in 61 total decode tokens, a factor of 6,574 fewer tokens and about 8,700x less energy; the capability claim proper rests on held-out transfer (7 of 7 at 31B). The same byte-exact store widens usable context from 32,768 to 2,854,766 tokens at zero extra accelerator memory, and moves byte-identical between machines of the same architecture. We describe the system at the behavior level; the engine is proprietary, and every reported number is backed by committed input and output hashes so the scoring can be re-checked without it.

Corbenci Corbenic
·
Jul 14 7

LiveXiv -- A Multi-Modal Live Benchmark Based on Arxiv Papers Content

The large-scale training of multi-modal models on data scraped from the web has shown outstanding utility in infusing these models with the required world knowledge to perform effectively on multiple downstream tasks. However, one downside of scraping data from the web can be the potential sacrifice of the benchmarks on which the abilities of these models are often evaluated. To safeguard against test data contamination and to truly test the abilities of these foundation models we propose LiveXiv: A scalable evolving live benchmark based on scientific ArXiv papers. LiveXiv accesses domain-specific manuscripts at any given timestamp and proposes to automatically generate visual question-answer pairs (VQA). This is done without any human-in-the-loop, using the multi-modal content in the manuscripts, like graphs, charts, and tables. Moreover, we introduce an efficient evaluation approach that estimates the performance of all models on the evolving benchmark using evaluations of only a subset of models. This significantly reduces the overall evaluation cost. We benchmark multiple open and proprietary Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) on the first version of our benchmark, showing its challenging nature and exposing the models true abilities, avoiding contamination. Lastly, in our commitment to high quality, we have collected and evaluated a manually verified subset. By comparing its overall results to our automatic annotations, we have found that the performance variance is indeed minimal (<2.5%). Our dataset is available online on HuggingFace, and our code will be available here.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 14, 2024 2

Verifying the Verifiers: Unveiling Pitfalls and Potentials in Fact Verifiers

Fact verification is essential for ensuring the reliability of LLM applications. In this study, we evaluate 12 pre-trained LLMs and one specialized fact-verifier, including frontier LLMs and open-weight reasoning LLMs, using a collection of examples from 14 fact-checking benchmarks. We share three findings intended to guide future development of more robust fact verifiers. First, we highlight the importance of addressing annotation errors and ambiguity in datasets, demonstrating that approximately 16\% of ambiguous or incorrectly labeled data substantially influences model rankings. Neglecting this issue may result in misleading conclusions during comparative evaluations, and we suggest using a systematic pipeline utilizing LLM-as-a-judge to help identify these issues at scale. Second, we discover that frontier LLMs with few-shot in-context examples, often overlooked in previous works, achieve top-tier performance. We therefore recommend future studies include comparisons with these simple yet highly effective baselines. Lastly, despite their effectiveness, frontier LLMs incur substantial costs, motivating the development of small, fine-tuned fact verifiers. We show that these small models still have room for improvement, particularly on instances that require complex reasoning. Encouragingly, we demonstrate that augmenting training with synthetic multi-hop reasoning data significantly enhances their capabilities in such instances. We release our code, model, and dataset at https://github.com/just1nseo/verifying-the-verifiers

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 16, 2025

VERINA: Benchmarking Verifiable Code Generation

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated in software development, but ensuring correctness in LLM-generated code remains challenging and often requires costly manual review. Verifiable code generation -- jointly generating code, specifications, and proofs of code-specification alignment -- offers a promising path to address this limitation and further unleash LLMs' benefits in coding. Yet, there exists a significant gap in evaluation: current benchmarks often lack support for end-to-end verifiable code generation. In this paper, we introduce Verina (Verifiable Code Generation Arena), a high-quality benchmark enabling a comprehensive and modular evaluation of code, specification, and proof generation as well as their compositions. Verina consists of 189 manually curated coding tasks in Lean, with detailed problem descriptions, reference implementations, formal specifications, and extensive test suites. Our extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs reveals significant challenges in verifiable code generation, especially in proof generation, underscoring the need for improving LLM-based theorem provers in verification domains. The best model, OpenAI o4-mini, generates only 61.4% correct code, 51.0% sound and complete specifications, and 3.6% successful proofs, with one trial per task. We hope Verina will catalyze progress in verifiable code generation by providing a rigorous and comprehensive benchmark. We release our dataset on https://huggingface.co/datasets/sunblaze-ucb/verina and our evaluation code on https://github.com/sunblaze-ucb/verina.

  • 6 authors
·
May 29, 2025

A Rust-to-Lean Verification Pipeline with AI Provers: An Experience Report

We describe a verification pipeline that takes production Rust cryptographic code and produces machine-checked correctness proofs in Lean 4. The pipeline combines three components: symbolic extraction tools (Charon and Aeneas, or Hax) that lift Rust into Lean 4; formal cryptographic specification libraries (ArkLib and CompPoly, from the Verified zkEVM project) that provide the mathematical targets; and AI provers (Aristotle from Harmonic AI and Aleph from Logical Intelligence) that close the resulting proof obligations. Every proof is checked by the Lean kernel, so AI output cannot compromise soundness. Within the scope of the Ethereum Foundation's zkEVM Verification Project, we applied the pipeline to cryptographic primitives in Plonky3 (FRI folding, Mersenne31 and KoalaBear field arithmetic, Horner polynomial evaluation) and RISC Zero (Merkle inclusion verification). In addition, Aleph authored proofs of two bounds-style theorems in Plonky3's compute_log_arity_for_round that previously stood as sorry. The paper describes the architecture, walks through a running example based on Aleph's two proofs, reports which classes of proof obligations AI closed and which required manual work, and discusses the engineering gaps we encountered: Lean 4 toolchain drift across tools and specific Aeneas/Hax extraction limits. We also document concrete missing lemmas, tactic gaps, and code-generation friction points discovered during proof development. We hope this contribution lowers the barrier to adoption of formal verification and facilitates more effective use of AI in this pipeline. The result is a working pipeline for formal verification of Rust, with kernel-checked proofs and reproducible artefacts.

  • 3 authors
·
May 27

Theoria: Rewrite-Acceptability Verification over Informal Reasoning States

When should an AI system's answer be trusted? Formal proof assistants offer certainty but cannot reach most of the problem distribution; scalar LLM judges offer coverage but produce opaque scores that cannot be audited after the fact and are subject to the same coherence issues as any LLM. We present Theoria, a verification architecture that closes this gap. A candidate solution is rewritten into a sequence of typed state transitions, each licensed by an explicit justification, whether that be a citation, computation, or problem-given fact, and every transition is independently auditable. The foundational invariant is completeness of change: every difference between consecutive proof states must be accounted for, so hidden premises surface as unlicensed mutations rather than passing silently. On HLE-Verified Gold (185 text-only expert problems), Theoria certifies 105 at 91.4% strict precision (Wilson 95% CI [84.5%, 95.4%]). Every certification produces a human readable proof trace in which each step can be independently challenged. Holistic LLM judges achieve comparable precision at matched coverage but fail on different problems (Jaccard 0.14-0.36), making the approaches complementary. On 95 adversarial poisoned proofs across 15 domains, structured judges catch 94.7% versus 83.2% for holistic judging (p= 0.0017). The overall 11.5 pp gap concentrates in hidden premises (90.6% vs. 62.5%, a 28 pp difference) and fabricated citations (100% vs. 90%), the error classes where the formal analysis predicts an advantage; performance is identical on arithmetic and theorem-misapplication errors, where no advantage is predicted. On GPQA Diamond (n= 65), certified precision is 97.1% (Wilson CI [85.1%, 99.5%]).

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 1

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

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

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 4, 2025 2

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

Verified Detection and Prevention of Concurrency Anomalies in Multi-Agent Large Language Model Systems

Multi-agent LLM systems share state through memory stores, vector indices, and tool registries. We model such sharing as long-running read-generate-write operations under deterministic-generation semantics -- the regime durable-execution engines enforce by deterministic replay -- and formalize four concurrency anomalies in TLA+: stale-generation, phantom-tool, causal-cascade, and tool-effect reordering, structural analogues of classical isolation anomalies, each with a TLC counter-example. The exclusion lattice over these anomalies is trivial; the contribution is the mechanically verified realizability and strict separation of one maximal chain within it, L_0 subsetneq cdots subsetneq L_4, to our knowledge the first machine-checked consistency hierarchy for such runtimes. A development of 274 Verus obligations (zero assume, zero admit; trust base: two structural axioms and a mutex correspondence) proves the detectors sound and complete against the specifications and each runtime its avoidance set. Three deployed Rust runtimes realize L0-L1 (pessimistic locking, serializable snapshot isolation, default-SI), each verified against stale-generation and refined to its state machine; L2-L4 are exec-mode-verified with dependency-free prevention twins (A3, A6, A2: 0/1000 versus 1000/1000), and L2 is run live across three model families (A3 prevented in all 120 retracted sessions). We reproduce a silent lost update in ByteDance's deer-flow, formalizing its fix as a verified L_0 to L_1 refinement, and exhibit tool-effect reordering in LangGraph's ToolNode on unmodified output, removed by an L3 commit-order sequencer. The verified detector, refinements, and realizability artifacts are the contribution; the phenomena and lattice are classical.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 14 1

Automating Formal Verification with Reinforcement Learning and Recursive Inference

Automated formal verification remains challenging for large language models because data for proof assistants and verification-aware languages is scarce, and correctness depends on satisfying precise machine-checkable specifications rather than producing plausible code. This thesis studies how verifier environments can improve LLM generation of verified programs and proofs through reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) and verifier-guided inference-time search. First, we train open-source models in Dafny with RLVR using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and related variants, assembling generated candidates into complete programs and scoring them with compiler and verifier outcomes. Initial experiments on an APPS-derived Dafny dataset increased verified reward from 2.2% to 58.1%, but revealed specification hacking, where models exploit weak formal specifications instead of implementing the intended solutions. After filtering underspecified and vulnerable tasks, multi-turn RLVR on the refined benchmark improves the verified pass rate from 9.7% to 31.1%. Second, we develop a verifier-guided inference scaffold in Lean that treats proof generation as structured search over decomposed subgoals, verifier feedback, diagnostics, and repair. With a fixed base model, the full scaffold with proof reviser improves pass rate on an initial VeriCoding pilot set from 46.2% under direct repair to 69.2%. On the larger VERINA dataset, whole-task decomposition plus proof reviser solves 7 of 42 previously unsolved tasks. We also introduce Dalek-Bench, a repository-scale Lean benchmark derived from the Rust curve25519-dalek verification project; preliminary results remain weak, indicating that stronger progress evaluation and task-specific tool-use policies are still needed.

  • 1 authors
·
May 28

When Does Verification Pay Off? A Closer Look at LLMs as Solution Verifiers

Large language models (LLMs) can act as both problem solvers and solution verifiers, where the latter select high-quality answers from a pool of solver-generated candidates. This raises the question of under what conditions verification pays off in solver-verifier systems. Prior work has conducted only limited studies of the factors influencing verification performance, focusing primarily on self-verification and examining neither the relationship between solver and verifier model families nor the effects of reasoning post-training. To rectify this, we present a systematic study across 37 models spanning multiple families, sizes, and base vs. post-trained variants, evaluated on 9 benchmarks covering logical reasoning, structured puzzles, symbolic computation, mathematics, commonsense, factual recall, and domain knowledge. In order to support our analysis, we introduce and empirically validate verifier gain, a metric that predicts the performance improvements from test-time verifier-based rejection sampling. Our experiments find that 1) verification across model families is more effective than either self-verification or verification within the same family, and more generally that the benefits of verification decrease as the solver and verifier become more similar, 2) reasoning post-training weakens self-improvement abilities but strengthens cross-family improvement, and 3) some tasks are inherently more amenable to improvement through verification, particularly mathematical and logical tasks.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 20

Verus-SpecGym: An Agentic Environment for Evaluating Specification Autoformalization

AI coding agents are increasingly used to write real-world software, but ensuring that their outputs are correct remains a fundamental challenge. Formal verification offers a promising path: an agent generates code together with a machine-checked proof, guaranteeing that the code satisfies a formal specification. However, there is no guarantee that the formal spec itself matches the user's intent. In this work, we study specification autoformalization: whether LLM agents can translate informal programming problems into faithful formal specifications. We introduce Verus-SpecBench, a benchmark of 581 spec-writing tasks derived from Codeforces problems targeting Verus, a verifier for Rust, and Verus-SpecGym, an agentic environment in which models interact with Verus, bash, & the filesystem to develop these specs. The central challenge is evaluation: expert-written reference specs are expensive to write, & LLM judges can miss subtle mistakes. We address this by (a) extending Verus's exec_spec mechanism so that generated specs can be executed as Rust code, & (b) testing them against official Codeforces tests & adversarial cases extracted from Codeforces "hacks", which are edge cases written by competitors to break incorrect solutions. On Verus-SpecBench, the strongest model, Gemini 3.1 Pro, solves 77.8% of tasks, other frontier models solve 51.1--57.8% & OSS models reach only 21.5--25.5%. Our analysis of failure modes shows that model-generated specs can omit important input assumptions, accept incorrect outputs, & reject valid ones. We also find that LLM-as-a-judge evaluation misses 26% of the failures our evaluator catches. Overall, our results suggest that spec autoformalization is within reach for frontier agents but remains brittle even on problems where they can already generate correct code. The code, data, & logs can be found at https://github.com/formal-verif-is-cool/verus-spec-gym

LiCoEval: Evaluating LLMs on License Compliance in Code Generation

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized code generation, leading to widespread adoption of AI coding tools by developers. However, LLMs can generate license-protected code without providing the necessary license information, leading to potential intellectual property violations during software production. This paper addresses the critical, yet underexplored, issue of license compliance in LLM-generated code by establishing a benchmark to evaluate the ability of LLMs to provide accurate license information for their generated code. To establish this benchmark, we conduct an empirical study to identify a reasonable standard for "striking similarity" that excludes the possibility of independent creation, indicating a copy relationship between the LLM output and certain open-source code. Based on this standard, we propose LiCoEval, to evaluate the license compliance capabilities of LLMs, i.e., the ability to provide accurate license or copyright information when they generate code with striking similarity to already existing copyrighted code. Using LiCoEval, we evaluate 14 popular LLMs, finding that even top-performing LLMs produce a non-negligible proportion (0.88% to 2.01%) of code strikingly similar to existing open-source implementations. Notably, most LLMs fail to provide accurate license information, particularly for code under copyleft licenses. These findings underscore the urgent need to enhance LLM compliance capabilities in code generation tasks. Our study provides a foundation for future research and development to improve license compliance in AI-assisted software development, contributing to both the protection of open-source software copyrights and the mitigation of legal risks for LLM users.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 5, 2024

A Frozen 12B Beats Frontier Models on Verified Work: 100% Accuracy, 0 Tokens, Bit-Exact, Forever

Improving a language model today means retraining it: enormous compute, a new opaque model each cycle, non-deterministic output. We take the opposite path: the model stays frozen, and a persistent memory of verified solutions grows beside it. Once a problem family is solved and has passed an independent verification step that never consults the answer key, every new instance of that family is answered at zero generation tokens, bit-exact, deterministically. Across 180 fresh instances spanning nine problem families, four architectures from four vendors - dense and mixture-of-experts - each score 180/180 at zero generation tokens per answer: execution-bound capability decoupled from parameter scaling. A negative control attributes the capability fully to the memory: emptied, it solves nothing. The same verify-before-store contract holds for open-ended reasoning: 88/88 consistency-gated acceptances across all four models, machine-checked formal proof, and reasoning-method transfer at 77/80. Memory selection takes 1.4 microseconds; a full reuse completes in 6-23 ms at 36 mWh. Approximate similarity retrieval selects the wrong item 94.3% of the time on a 4,500-item verified store where exact addressing makes zero errors. The store also serves as working context at a scale no shipped engine matches: a 6,000,000-token movable window on a single 46 GB GPU at flat memory, where vLLM stops at 30,399 tokens and SGLang silently truncates past 32,000. On published benchmarks, frontier models remain far ahead of any 12B at raw from-scratch reasoning; on everything this system has solved and verified, the comparison inverts: a frontier API call pays a fresh generation pass on every query, forever, while verified reuse costs zero tokens and returns the identical bits every time. A public testbench with free, rate-limited access accompanies this report: https://corbenic-galahad-bench.hf.space

Corbenci Corbenic
·
Jul 25 4

The 17% Gap: Quantifying Epistemic Decay in AI-Assisted Survey Papers

The adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) in scientific writing promises efficiency but risks introducing informational entropy. While "hallucinated papers" are a known artifact, the systematic degradation of valid citation chains remains unquantified. We conducted a forensic audit of 50 recent survey papers in Artificial Intelligence (N=5,514 citations) published between September 2024 and January 2026. We utilized a hybrid verification pipeline combining DOI resolution, Crossref metadata analysis, Semantic Scholar queries, and fuzzy text matching to distinguish between formatting errors ("Sloppiness") and verifiable non-existence ("Phantoms). We detect a persistent 17.0% Phantom Rate -- citations that cannot be resolved to any digital object despite aggressive forensic recovery. Diagnostic categorization reveals three distinct failure modes: pure hallucinations (5.1%), hallucinated identifiers with valid titles (16.4%), and parsing-induced matching failures (78.5%). Longitudinal analysis reveals a flat trend (+0.07 pp/month), suggesting that high-entropy citation practices have stabilized as an endemic feature of the field. The scientific citation graph in AI survey literature exhibits "link rot" at scale. This suggests a mechanism where AI tools act as "lazy research assistants," retrieving correct titles but hallucinating metadata, thereby severing the digital chain of custody required for reproducible science.

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 23

Weak-to-Strong Elicitation via Mismatched Wrong Drafts

We consider whether off-policy experience from a smaller, weaker model can elicit capability in a stronger learner that on-policy RL fine-tuning (e.g., GRPO) does not reach. We find that injecting mathematically wrong drafts from a smaller but more domain-trained model -- mismatched to the current problem -- into a stronger learner's GRPO context consistently outperforms standard on-policy GRPO on held-out MATH-500 and out-of-distribution AIME 2025/2026. Concretely, we use Mathstral-7B as the learner, Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B as the draft model, 8.8K Level 3--5 MATH problems (with MATH-500 held out), and train with Dr. GRPO. Mismatch is an active ingredient: shuffling drafts to mismatched problems while holding everything else constant yields +1.62pp on MATH-500 (greedy pass@1) over the matched-wrong variant (n=10 seeds, p=0.0015, Welch's t). In fact, the mismatched-wrong variant leads all other variants we tested on MATH-500 across both greedy pass@1 and sampling pass@k. On out-of-distribution AIME 2025 and 2026, the mismatched-wrong variant uniquely lifts pass@k above both Mathstral-7B (in its native [INST] format) and the Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B draft model at every sample budget from k=1 to k=1024 across 2 seeds (+14.2pp on 2025 and +9.0pp on 2026 at pass@1024 over Mathstral-7B), and at pass@1024 also leads no-draft, matched-wrong, and mismatched-correct variants on both years. All variants use the same prompt with no draft injection at test time. The recipe -- trained on a single GPU with no SFT, no reward models, no synthesized data, and no produce-critique-revise inner loop -- reaches 71.98% MATH-500 on Mathstral-7B-v0.1, the highest published result on this model to our knowledge, surpassing the heavier WizardMath pipeline at 70.9% on full MATH (SFT + PPO with process/instruction reward models).

  • 1 authors
·
May 16

Putnam-AXIOM: A Functional and Static Benchmark

Current mathematical reasoning benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are approaching saturation, with some achieving > 90% accuracy, and are increasingly compromised by training-set contamination. We introduce Putnam-AXIOM, a benchmark of 522 university-level competition problems drawn from the prestigious William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, and Putnam-AXIOM Variation, an unseen companion set of 100 functional variants generated by programmatically perturbing variables and constants. The variation protocol produces an unlimited stream of equally difficult, unseen instances -- yielding a contamination-resilient test bed. On the Original set, OpenAI's o1-preview -- the strongest evaluated model -- scores 41.9%, but its accuracy drops by 19.6% (46.8% relative decrease) on the paired Variations. The remaining eighteen models show the same downward trend, ten of them with non-overlapping 95% confidence intervals. These gaps suggest memorization and highlight the necessity of dynamic benchmarks. We complement "boxed" accuracy with Teacher-Forced Accuracy (TFA), a lightweight metric that directly scores reasoning traces and automates natural language proof evaluations. Putnam-AXIOM therefore provides a rigorous, contamination-resilient evaluation framework for assessing advanced mathematical reasoning of LLMs. Data and evaluation code are publicly available at https://github.com/brando90/putnam-axiom.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 5, 2025 2

Fast and Faithful: Real-Time Verification for Long-Document Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is increasingly deployed in enterprise search and document-centric assistants, where responses must be grounded in long and complex source materials. In practice, verifying that generated answers faithfully reflect retrieved documents is difficult: large language models can check long contexts but are too slow and costly for interactive services, while lightweight classifiers operate within strict context limits and frequently miss evidence outside truncated passages. We present the design of a real-time verification component integrated into a production RAG pipeline that enables full-document grounding under latency constraints. The system processes documents up to 32K tokens and employs adaptive inference strategies to balance response time and verification coverage across workloads. We describe the architectural decisions, operational trade-offs, and evaluation methodology used to deploy the verifier, and show that full-context verification substantially improves detection of unsupported responses compared with truncated validation. Our experience highlights when long-context verification is necessary, why chunk-based checking often fails in real documents, and how latency budgets shape model design. These findings provide practical guidance for practitioners building reliable large-scale retrieval-augmented applications. (Model, benchmark, and code: https://huggingface.co/llm-semantic-router)

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 3

Neurosymbolic Auditing of Natural-Language Software Requirements

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

  • 2 authors
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May 12

Towards Automated Formal Verification of Backend Systems with LLMs

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

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 13, 2025

GSM-SEM: Benchmark and Framework for Generating Semantically Variant Augmentations

Benchmarks like GSM8K are popular measures of mathematical reasoning, but leaderboard gains can overstate true capability due to memorization of fixed test sets. Most robustness variants apply surface-level perturbations (paraphrases, renamings, number swaps, distractors) that largely preserve the underlying facts, and static releases can themselves become memorization targets over time. We introduce GSM-SEM, a reusable and stochastic framework for generating semantically diverse benchmark variants with substantially higher semantic variance than prior approaches. GSM-SEM perturbs problem statements by modifying entities, attributes, and/or relationships, frequently altering underlying facts and requiring models to recompute solutions under new conditions, while constraining generation to preserve the original calculations/answer and approximate problem difficulty. GSM-SEM generates fresh variants on each run without requiring re-annotation, reducing reliance on static public benchmarks for evaluation and thereby lowering the bias of memorization. We apply GSM-SEM on GSM8K and two existing variation suites (GSM-Symbolic and GSM-Plus), producing GSM8K-SEM, GSM-Symbolic-SEM, and GSM-Plus-SEM. Evaluating 14 SOTA LLMs, we observe consistent performance drops with larger decline when semantic perturbations are coupled with symbolic/plus variations (average drop rate 28% in maximum strictness configuration of GSM-SEM). We publicly release the three SEM variants as fully human-validated datasets. Finally, to demonstrate applicability beyond GSM-style math problems, we apply GSM-SEM to additional benchmarks including BigBenchHard, LogicBench, and NLR-BIRD.

  • 14 authors
·
May 25

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

Verifiable by Design: Aligning Language Models to Quote from Pre-Training Data

For humans to trust the fluent generations of large language models (LLMs), they must be able to verify their correctness against trusted, external sources. Recent efforts aim to increase verifiability through citations of retrieved documents or post-hoc provenance. However, such citations are prone to mistakes that further complicate their verifiability. To address these limitations, we tackle the verifiability goal with a different philosophy: we trivialize the verification process by developing models that quote verbatim statements from trusted sources in pre-training data. We propose Quote-Tuning, which demonstrates the feasibility of aligning LLMs to leverage memorized information and quote from pre-training data. Quote-Tuning quantifies quoting against large corpora with efficient membership inference tools, and uses the amount of quotes as an implicit reward signal to construct a synthetic preference dataset for quoting, without any human annotation. Next, the target model is aligned to quote using preference optimization algorithms. Experimental results show that Quote-Tuning significantly increases the percentage of LLM generation quoted verbatim from high-quality pre-training documents by 55% to 130% relative to untuned models while maintaining response quality. Further experiments demonstrate that Quote-Tuning generalizes quoting to out-of-domain data, is applicable in different tasks, and provides additional benefits to truthfulness. Quote-Tuning not only serves as a hassle-free method to increase quoting but also opens up avenues for improving LLM trustworthiness through better verifiability.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 4, 2024

Knowledge-Augmented Language Model Verification

Recent Language Models (LMs) have shown impressive capabilities in generating texts with the knowledge internalized in parameters. Yet, LMs often generate the factually incorrect responses to the given queries, since their knowledge may be inaccurate, incomplete, and outdated. To address this problem, previous works propose to augment LMs with the knowledge retrieved from an external knowledge source. However, such approaches often show suboptimal text generation performance due to two reasons: 1) the model may fail to retrieve the knowledge relevant to the given query, or 2) the model may not faithfully reflect the retrieved knowledge in the generated text. To overcome these, we propose to verify the output and the knowledge of the knowledge-augmented LMs with a separate verifier, which is a small LM that is trained to detect those two types of errors through instruction-finetuning. Then, when the verifier recognizes an error, we can rectify it by either retrieving new knowledge or generating new text. Further, we use an ensemble of the outputs from different instructions with a single verifier to enhance the reliability of the verification processes. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed verification steps on multiple question answering benchmarks, whose results show that the proposed verifier effectively identifies retrieval and generation errors, allowing LMs to provide more factually correct outputs. Our code is available at https://github.com/JinheonBaek/KALMV.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 19, 2023

FVEL: Interactive Formal Verification Environment with Large Language Models via Theorem Proving

Formal verification (FV) has witnessed growing significance with current emerging program synthesis by the evolving large language models (LLMs). However, current formal verification mainly resorts to symbolic verifiers or hand-craft rules, resulting in limitations for extensive and flexible verification. On the other hand, formal languages for automated theorem proving, such as Isabelle, as another line of rigorous verification, are maintained with comprehensive rules and theorems. In this paper, we propose FVEL, an interactive Formal Verification Environment with LLMs. Specifically, FVEL transforms a given code to be verified into Isabelle, and then conducts verification via neural automated theorem proving with an LLM. The joined paradigm leverages the rigorous yet abundant formulated and organized rules in Isabelle and is also convenient for introducing and adjusting cutting-edge LLMs. To achieve this goal, we extract a large-scale FVELER3. The FVELER dataset includes code dependencies and verification processes that are formulated in Isabelle, containing 758 theories, 29,125 lemmas, and 200,646 proof steps in total with in-depth dependencies. We benchmark FVELER in the FVEL environment by first fine-tuning LLMs with FVELER and then evaluating them on Code2Inv and SV-COMP. The results show that FVEL with FVELER fine-tuned Llama3- 8B solves 17.39% (69 -> 81) more problems, and Mistral-7B 12% (75 -> 84) more problems in SV-COMP. And the proportion of proof errors is reduced. Project page: https://fveler.github.io/.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 20, 2024

AdvancedMathBench: A Benchmark Suite for Advanced Mathematical Proof Generation and Verification

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on high-school and olympiad-style mathematics, yet their capabilities on advanced mathematics remain poorly understood. Existing benchmarks, however, fall short in both scope and evaluation granularity: they provide limited disciplinary coverage and often rely on final-answer correctness or coarse judgments, leaving the validity of the reasoning process inadequately assessed. To bridge this gap, we introduce AdvancedMathBench, a benchmark suite designed to evaluate advanced mathematical reasoning capabilities. Its core proof-generation benchmark, ProverBench, contains 296 problems spanning undergraduate and doctoral qualifying-exam levels. To provide reliable evaluation of the proofs, we develop a dedicated automatic verification pipeline trained on large-scale expert annotations to produce both correctness verdicts and fine-grained assessments of proof errors, which exhibits strong agreement with human experts on held-out proof trajectories. We further introduce VerifierBench, consisting of 888 model-generated proof trajectories paired with expert ground truth, to evaluate whether models can correctly judge proof validity and provide sound verification rationales. Experiments show that AdvancedMathBench remains challenging for frontier models. On proof generation, the best-performing model, GPT-5.5-xhigh, achieves only 75.8 and 66.1 on the UGD and QE splits, respectively, indicating substantial room for improvement on advanced mathematical proof construction. On proof verification, the best model attains a Balanced F1 of only 65.1, and models generally exhibit low true negative rates, suggesting that critical error detection remains a major bottleneck.

VeriContest: A Competitive-Programming Benchmark for Verifiable Code Generation

Large language models can generate useful code from natural language, but their outputs come without correctness guarantees. Verifiable code generation offers a path beyond testing by requiring models to produce not only executable code, but also formal specifications and machine-checkable proofs. Progress in this direction, however, is difficult to measure: existing benchmarks are often small, focus on only one part of the pipeline, lack ground-truth proofs or rigorous specification validation, or target verification settings far from mainstream software development. We present VeriContest, a benchmark of 946 competitive-programming problems from LeetCode and Codeforces for verifiable code generation in Rust with Verus. Each problem pairs a natural language description with expert-validated formal specifications, judge-accepted Rust code, Verus-checked proofs, and positive and negative test suites. VeriContest is constructed through a three-phase pipeline that scales from manually verified seed problems to semi-automated expansion with human-in-the-loop review. To further strengthen benchmark quality, we use testing as an additional quality-assurance layer for validating postcondition completeness. VeriContest supports isolated and compositional evaluation of specification generation, code generation, proof generation, and end-to-end verified program synthesis. Evaluating ten state-of-the-art models reveals a sharp gap between coding ability and verifiable code generation: the strongest model reaches 92.18% on natural-language-to-code generation, but only 48.31% on specification generation, 13.95% on proof generation, and 5.29% end-to-end. These results identify proof and specification generation as the central bottlenecks for models and establish VeriContest as a rigorous platform for measuring and training future systems that generate code with machine-checkable correctness.

  • 8 authors
·
May 7

The Faithfulness Gap: Certifying Semantic Equivalence Between Natural-Language and Formal Mathematical Statements

Autoformalization, translating natural-language mathematics into formal proof assistants, is bottlenecked not by translation fluency but by faithfulness: a formal statement can typecheck and be provable, yet still encode a different theorem than the source intended. We introduce Bidirectional Provability Fingerprinting (), a framework that certifies faithfulness by characterizing each candidate through its forward and backward consequence neighborhoods in the ambient theory and matching these against probes derived from the natural-language statement. We further introduce four novel components: (i) Counterfactual Probe Generation (), a contrastive procedure that synthesizes probes targeting specific drift directions; (ii) the Equivalence Spectrum, a continuous faithfulness score that replaces brittle binary verdicts; (iii) Adaptive Probe Budget Allocation (), an information-theoretic budget router; and (iv) Faithfulness-Guided Decoding (), which uses signals as a reward during autoformalization. We prove a drift detection theorem and a PAC-faithfulness result establishing that the equivalence class of a natural language statement is learnable from O(log(1/δ)/varepsilon) probes under mild assumptions. We release , a benchmark of 2{,}183 NL/Lean~4 pairs with controlled drift labels across six subfields of mathlib4. \,+\, detects 89.6% of drifted formalizations at a 3.0% false-positive rate-against 41.2% for typecheck and 63.3% for LLM-judge baselines, and reduces the rate at which a state-of-the-art autoformalizer emits drifted statements by 47%. https://pmlrbd.github.io/BPF/

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 14

Two-Level Meta-Rubrics for Evaluating Open-Ended Generation: GAMUT, a Benchmark for Factual Completeness

Evaluating the factuality of long-form generations has focused predominantly on precision, measuring whether the claims a model makes are correct. The dominant decompose-search-verify pipeline catches incorrect claims well but says little about whether a response contains all the information it should. Measuring factual completeness, the missing half of factuality, is harder: it requires enumerating the full set of facts a complete answer should contain, and these facts rarely form a flat list. They often involve open-ended sets where coverage is what matters, ordered processes, and relationships among facts that a list of independent boolean checks fails to capture. We introduce a two-level meta-rubric framework for evaluating open-ended generation, and instantiate it as Gamut (Grounded Assessment of Multimodal Factuality), a benchmark for factual completeness in long-form generation. The framework rests on a two-level rubric representation: a structured meta-rubric captures the organization and importance of the required content, which is then mechanically compiled into a flat checklist of binary, machine-gradable rubrics that an LLM judge scores reliably. We construct 1,813 questions grounded in real wearable imagery across 10 diverse domains, each paired with an evidence-backed rubric verified by expert human annotators. Because the framework is modality-agnostic, we also release a text-only variant. Evaluating 14 frontier and open-weight models, we find the benchmark genuinely challenging (best score 58.7% from Gemini 3.1 Pro), highly discriminative, and robust to the choice of judge.

facebook AI at Meta
·
Jul 20 2

VerifyBench: A Systematic Benchmark for Evaluating Reasoning Verifiers Across Domains

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance their reasoning capabilities through feedback. A critical challenge is verifying the consistency of model-generated responses and reference answers, since these responses are often lengthy, diverse, and nuanced. Rule-based verifiers struggle with complexity, prompting the use of model-based verifiers. However, specialized verifiers lack flexibility, while general LLM judges can be inconsistent. Existing research primarily focuses on building better verifiers, yet a systematic evaluation of different types of verifiers' performance across domains remains lacking, severely constraining the reliable development of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR). To address this, we propose VerifyBench--a cross-domain comprehensive benchmark for systematically evaluating verifiers. We construct 4,000 expert-level questions covering mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology. Each question is equipped with reference answers and diverse responses. The reliability of the evaluation is ensured through a rigorous annotation process conducted by a multidisciplinary expert team. We design a four-dimensional experimental framework to comprehensively compare the performance boundaries of specialized verifiers and general LLMs under combined conditions of extracted answers vs. complete responses, and short vs. long outputs. Our evaluation uncovers fundamental trade-offs in verifiers: while specialized verifiers achieve leading accuracy, they exhibit deficiencies in recall; general models show stronger inclusivity but unstable precision. More importantly, we discover verifiers' high sensitivity to input structure and inherent limitations in cross-domain generalization, providing critical insights into the bottlenecks of current verifier technology.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 13, 2025

Neural Theorem Proving: Generating and Structuring Proofs for Formal Verification

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

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 23, 2025

Evaluating Large Language Models for Code Review

Context: Code reviews are crucial for software quality. Recent AI advances have allowed large language models (LLMs) to review and fix code; now, there are tools that perform these reviews. However, their reliability and accuracy have not yet been systematically evaluated. Objective: This study compares different LLMs' performance in detecting code correctness and suggesting improvements. Method: We tested GPT4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash on 492 AI generated code blocks of varying correctness, along with 164 canonical code blocks from the HumanEval benchmark. To simulate the code review task objectively, we expected LLMs to assess code correctness and improve the code if needed. We ran experiments with different configurations and reported on the results. Results: With problem descriptions, GPT4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash correctly classified code correctness 68.50% and 63.89% of the time, respectively, and corrected the code 67.83% and 54.26% of the time for the 492 code blocks of varying correctness. Without problem descriptions, performance declined. The results for the 164 canonical code blocks differed, suggesting that performance depends on the type of code. Conclusion: LLM code reviews can help suggest improvements and assess correctness, but there is a risk of faulty outputs. We propose a process that involves humans, called the "Human in the loop LLM Code Review" to promote knowledge sharing while mitigating the risk of faulty outputs.

  • 4 authors
·
May 26, 2025

Verification Limits Code LLM Training

Large language models for code generation increasingly rely on synthetic data, where both problem solutions and verification tests are generated by models. While this enables scalable data creation, it introduces a previously unexplored bottleneck: the verification ceiling, in which the quality and diversity of training data are fundamentally constrained by the capabilities of synthetic verifiers. In this work, we systematically study how verification design and strategies influence model performance. We investigate (i) what we verify by analyzing the impact of test complexity and quantity: richer test suites improve code generation capabilities (on average +3 pass@1), while quantity alone yields diminishing returns, (ii) how we verify by exploring relaxed pass thresholds: rigid 100% pass criteria can be overly restrictive. By allowing for relaxed thresholds or incorporating LLM-based soft verification, we can recover valuable training data, leading to a 2-4 point improvement in pass@1 performance. However, this benefit is contingent upon the strength and diversity of the test cases used, and (iii) why verification remains necessary through controlled comparisons of formally correct versus incorrect solutions and human evaluation: retaining diverse correct solutions per problem yields consistent generalization gains. Our results show that Verification as currently practiced is too rigid, filtering out valuable diversity. But it cannot be discarded, only recalibrated. By combining calibrated verification with diverse, challenging problem-solution pairs, we outline a path to break the verification ceiling and unlock stronger code generation models.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 25, 2025

MetaRAG: Metamorphic Testing for Hallucination Detection in RAG Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in enterprise applications, yet their reliability remains limited by hallucinations, i.e., confident but factually incorrect information. Existing detection approaches, such as SelfCheckGPT and MetaQA, primarily target standalone LLMs and do not address the unique challenges of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, where responses must be consistent with retrieved evidence. We therefore present MetaRAG, a metamorphic testing framework for hallucination detection in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. MetaRAG operates in a real-time, unsupervised, black-box setting, requiring neither ground-truth references nor access to model internals, making it suitable for proprietary and high-stakes domains. The framework proceeds in four stages: (1) decompose answers into atomic factoids, (2) generate controlled mutations of each factoid using synonym and antonym substitutions, (3) verify each variant against the retrieved context (synonyms are expected to be entailed and antonyms contradicted), and (4) aggregate penalties for inconsistencies into a response-level hallucination score. Crucially for identity-aware AI, MetaRAG localizes unsupported claims at the factoid span where they occur (e.g., pregnancy-specific precautions, LGBTQ+ refugee rights, or labor eligibility), allowing users to see flagged spans and enabling system designers to configure thresholds and guardrails for identity-sensitive queries. Experiments on a proprietary enterprise dataset illustrate the effectiveness of MetaRAG for detecting hallucinations and enabling trustworthy deployment of RAG-based conversational agents. We also outline a topic-based deployment design that translates MetaRAG's span-level scores into identity-aware safeguards; this design is discussed but not evaluated in our experiments.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 11, 2025

CiteAudit: You Cited It, But Did You Read It? A Benchmark for Verifying Scientific References in the LLM Era

Scientific research relies on accurate citation for attribution and integrity, yet large language models (LLMs) introduce a new risk: fabricated references that appear plausible but correspond to no real publications. Such hallucinated citations have already been observed in submissions and accepted papers at major machine learning venues, exposing vulnerabilities in peer review. Meanwhile, rapidly growing reference lists make manual verification impractical, and existing automated tools remain fragile to noisy and heterogeneous citation formats and lack standardized evaluation. We present the first comprehensive benchmark and detection framework for hallucinated citations in scientific writing. Our multi-agent verification pipeline decomposes citation checking into claim extraction, evidence retrieval, passage matching, reasoning, and calibrated judgment to assess whether a cited source truly supports its claim. We construct a large-scale human-validated dataset across domains and define unified metrics for citation faithfulness and evidence alignment. Experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs reveal substantial citation errors and show that our framework significantly outperforms prior methods in both accuracy and interpretability. This work provides the first scalable infrastructure for auditing citations in the LLM era and practical tools to improve the trustworthiness of scientific references.

From Answers to States: Verifiable Process-Level Evaluation of Chemical Reasoning in Large Language Models

Large language models are increasingly used as chemistry assistants, yet most chemistry benchmarks still score only final answers. This masks a critical failure mode: a model may output the correct molecule, product, or option while its reasoning violates chemical logic. Existing process-level evaluators are hard to scale because LLM judges and human step-level process annotation are costly, inconsistent, and vulnerable to hallucination. We introduce ChemCoTBench-V2, a rule-verifiable diagnostic benchmark for low-cost, auditable evaluation of structured, verifier-addressable chemical reasoning traces. It spans molecular understanding, molecule editing, molecular optimization, and reaction prediction, with 5,620 evaluation samples across 18 reporting tasks. Models must expose key intermediate steps in expert-designed templates, and those steps are checked with deterministic chemistry rules and, for closed-answer tasks, reference traces rather than another LLM judge. Open-ended molecular optimization is evaluated with oracle-verifiable state constraints rather than strict trace matching. The benchmark reports three separate signals: final-answer correctness, template adherence, and step-wise verifier correctness over expert-refined intermediate commitments. Experiments on frontier models reveal a persistent gap between final-answer success and structured-reasoning-state consistency: models often follow the requested format while failing chemical-step checks, or answer correctly with weak supporting reasoning. ChemCoTBench-V2 enables fine-grained model comparison and identifies the concrete step at which the trace first violates the verifier.

  • 5 authors
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Jun 2

Can a Lightweight Automated AI Pipeline Solve Research-Level Mathematical Problems?

Large language models (LLMs) have recently achieved remarkable success in generating rigorous mathematical proofs, with "AI for Math" emerging as a vibrant field of research (Ju et al., 2026). While these models have mastered competition-level benchmarks like the International Mathematical Olympiad (Huang et al., 2025; Duan et al., 2025) and show promise in research applications through auto-formalization (Wang et al., 2025), their deployment via lightweight, natural-language pipelines for research problems remains underexplored. In this work, we demonstrate that next-generation models (e.g., Gemini 3 Pro, GPT-5.2 Pro), when integrated into a streamlined automated pipeline optimized for citation-based verification, can solve sophisticated research-grade problems. We evaluate our pipeline on two novel datasets: (1) the ICCM (2025) problem sets (comparable to the S.-T. Yau College Student Mathematics Contest) proposed by leading mathematicians (Shanghai Math Challenge, 2026), and (2) the "First Proof" problem set (Abouzaid et al., 2026), consisting of previously unpublished research questions. Our pipeline generated candidate proofs for all problems in the first two ICCM sets and the "First Proof" set. The solutions for the first two ICCM sets and Problem 4 of the "First Proof" set have been fully verified by our team. All generated proofs have been submitted to the official organization, and our generated results are publicly available at https://github.com/ml1301215/question_sets-test_results. We have open-sourced the code and developed a user-friendly UI for this workflow, accessible at https://github.com/ml1301215/research-math-assistant.

  • 5 authors
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Feb 14

Forbidden Science: Dual-Use AI Challenge Benchmark and Scientific Refusal Tests

The development of robust safety benchmarks for large language models requires open, reproducible datasets that can measure both appropriate refusal of harmful content and potential over-restriction of legitimate scientific discourse. We present an open-source dataset and testing framework for evaluating LLM safety mechanisms across mainly controlled substance queries, analyzing four major models' responses to systematically varied prompts. Our results reveal distinct safety profiles: Claude-3.5-sonnet demonstrated the most conservative approach with 73% refusals and 27% allowances, while Mistral attempted to answer 100% of queries. GPT-3.5-turbo showed moderate restriction with 10% refusals and 90% allowances, and Grok-2 registered 20% refusals and 80% allowances. Testing prompt variation strategies revealed decreasing response consistency, from 85% with single prompts to 65% with five variations. This publicly available benchmark enables systematic evaluation of the critical balance between necessary safety restrictions and potential over-censorship of legitimate scientific inquiry, while providing a foundation for measuring progress in AI safety implementation. Chain-of-thought analysis reveals potential vulnerabilities in safety mechanisms, highlighting the complexity of implementing robust safeguards without unduly restricting desirable and valid scientific discourse.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 7, 2025 2

Benchmarking Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph Validation

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) store structured factual knowledge by linking entities through relationships, crucial for many applications. These applications depend on the KG's factual accuracy, so verifying facts is essential, yet challenging. Expert manual verification is ideal but impractical on a large scale. Automated methods show promise but are not ready for real-world KGs. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer potential with their semantic understanding and knowledge access, yet their suitability and effectiveness for KG fact validation remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce FactCheck, a benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs for KG fact validation across three key dimensions: (1) LLMs internal knowledge; (2) external evidence via Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG); and (3) aggregated knowledge employing a multi-model consensus strategy. We evaluated open-source and commercial LLMs on three diverse real-world KGs. FactCheck also includes a RAG dataset with 2+ million documents tailored for KG fact validation. Additionally, we offer an interactive exploration platform for analyzing verification decisions. The experimental analyses demonstrate that while LLMs yield promising results, they are still not sufficiently stable and reliable to be used in real-world KG validation scenarios. Integrating external evidence through RAG methods yields fluctuating performance, providing inconsistent improvements over more streamlined approaches -- at higher computational costs. Similarly, strategies based on multi-model consensus do not consistently outperform individual models, underscoring the lack of a one-fits-all solution. These findings further emphasize the need for a benchmark like FactCheck to systematically evaluate and drive progress on this difficult yet crucial task.

FactCheck-AI Fact Check
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Feb 11 2

DeCon: Detecting Incorrect Assertions via Postconditions Generated by a Large Language Model

Recently, given the docstring for the target problem and the target function signature, large language models (LLMs) have been used not only to generate source code, but also to generate test cases, consisting of test inputs and assertions (e.g., in the form of checking an actual output against the expected output). However, as shown by our empirical study on assertions generated by four LLMs for the HumanEval benchmark, over 62% of the generated assertions are incorrect (i.e., failed on the ground-truth problem solution). To detect incorrect assertions (given the docstring and the target function signature along with a sample of example inputs and outputs), in this paper, we propose a new approach named DeCon to effectively detect incorrect assertions via LLM-generated postconditions for the target problem (a postcondition is a predicate that must always be true just after the execution of the ground-truth problem solution). Our approach requires a small set of I/O examples (i.e., a sample of example inputs and outputs) for the target problem (e.g., the I/O examples included in the docstring for a target problem in HumanEval). We use the given I/O examples to filter out those LLM-generated postconditions that are violated by at least one given I/O example. We then use the remaining postconditions to detect incorrect assertions as those assertions that violate at least one remaining postcondition. Experimental results show that DeCon can detect averagely more than 64% (63% and 65.5% detected by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, respectively) incorrect assertions generated by four state-of-the-art LLMs, and DeCon can also improve the effectiveness of these LLMs in code generation by 4% in terms of Pass@1. In addition, although DeCon might filter out correct assertions, the fault-finding ability of the remaining correct assertions decreases only slightly.

  • 11 authors
·
Jan 5, 2025

Real Money, Fake Models: Deceptive Model Claims in Shadow APIs

Access to frontier large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-5 and Gemini-2.5, is often hindered by high pricing, payment barriers, and regional restrictions. These limitations drive the proliferation of shadow APIs, third-party services that claim to provide access to official model services without regional limitations via indirect access. Despite their widespread use, it remains unclear whether shadow APIs deliver outputs consistent with those of the official APIs, raising concerns about the reliability of downstream applications and the validity of research findings that depend on them. In this paper, we present the first systematic audit between official LLM APIs and corresponding shadow APIs. We first identify 17 shadow APIs that have been utilized in 187 academic papers, with the most popular one reaching 5,966 citations and 58,639 GitHub stars by December 6, 2025. Through multidimensional auditing of three representative shadow APIs across utility, safety, and model verification, we uncover both indirect and direct evidence of deception practices in shadow APIs. Specifically, we reveal performance divergence reaching up to 47.21%, significant unpredictability in safety behaviors, and identity verification failures in 45.83% of fingerprint tests. These deceptive practices critically undermine the reproducibility and validity of scientific research, harm the interests of shadow API users, and damage the reputation of official model providers.

  • 6 authors
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Mar 2 1

Clip-and-Verify: Linear Constraint-Driven Domain Clipping for Accelerating Neural Network Verification

State-of-the-art neural network (NN) verifiers demonstrate that applying the branch-and-bound (BaB) procedure with fast bounding techniques plays a key role in tackling many challenging verification properties. In this work, we introduce the linear constraint-driven clipping framework, a class of scalable and efficient methods designed to enhance the efficacy of NN verifiers. Under this framework, we develop two novel algorithms that efficiently utilize linear constraints to 1) reduce portions of the input space that are either verified or irrelevant to a subproblem in the context of branch-and-bound, and 2) directly improve intermediate bounds throughout the network. The process novelly leverages linear constraints that often arise from bound propagation methods and is general enough to also incorporate constraints from other sources. It efficiently handles linear constraints using a specialized GPU procedure that can scale to large neural networks without the use of expensive external solvers. Our verification procedure, Clip-and-Verify, consistently tightens bounds across multiple benchmarks and can significantly reduce the number of subproblems handled during BaB. We show that our clipping algorithms can be integrated with BaB-based verifiers such as α,β-CROWN, utilizing either the split constraints in activation-space BaB or the output constraints that denote the unverified input space. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our procedure on a broad range of benchmarks where, in some instances, we witness a 96% reduction in the number of subproblems during branch-and-bound, and also achieve state-of-the-art verified accuracy across multiple benchmarks. Clip-and-Verify is part of the α,β-CROWN verifier (http://abcrown.org), the VNN-COMP 2025 winner. Code available at https://github.com/Verified-Intelligence/Clip_and_Verify.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 11, 2025

Do Language Models Know When They're Hallucinating References?

State-of-the-art language models (LMs) are notoriously susceptible to generating hallucinated information. Such inaccurate outputs not only undermine the reliability of these models but also limit their use and raise serious concerns about misinformation and propaganda. In this work, we focus on hallucinated book and article references and present them as the "model organism" of language model hallucination research, due to their frequent and easy-to-discern nature. We posit that if a language model cites a particular reference in its output, then it should ideally possess sufficient information about its authors and content, among other relevant details. Using this basic insight, we illustrate that one can identify hallucinated references without ever consulting any external resources, by asking a set of direct or indirect queries to the language model about the references. These queries can be considered as "consistency checks." Our findings highlight that while LMs, including GPT-4, often produce inconsistent author lists for hallucinated references, they also often accurately recall the authors of real references. In this sense, the LM can be said to "know" when it is hallucinating references. Furthermore, these findings show how hallucinated references can be dissected to shed light on their nature. Replication code and results can be found at https://github.com/microsoft/hallucinated-references.

  • 4 authors
·
May 29, 2023

Compiling C to Safe Rust, Formalized

The popularity of the Rust language continues to explode; yet, many critical codebases remain authored in C, and cannot be realistically rewritten by hand. Automatically translating C to Rust is thus an appealing course of action. Several works have gone down this path, handling an ever-increasing subset of C through a variety of Rust features, such as unsafe. While the prospect of automation is appealing, producing code that relies on unsafe negates the memory safety guarantees offered by Rust, and therefore the main advantages of porting existing codebases to memory-safe languages. We instead explore a different path, and explore what it would take to translate C to safe Rust; that is, to produce code that is trivially memory safe, because it abides by Rust's type system without caveats. Our work sports several original contributions: a type-directed translation from (a subset of) C to safe Rust; a novel static analysis based on "split trees" that allows expressing C's pointer arithmetic using Rust's slices and splitting operations; an analysis that infers exactly which borrows need to be mutable; and a compilation strategy for C's struct types that is compatible with Rust's distinction between non-owned and owned allocations. We apply our methodology to existing formally verified C codebases: the HACL* cryptographic library, and binary parsers and serializers from EverParse, and show that the subset of C we support is sufficient to translate both applications to safe Rust. Our evaluation shows that for the few places that do violate Rust's aliasing discipline, automated, surgical rewrites suffice; and that the few strategic copies we insert have a negligible performance impact. Of particular note, the application of our approach to HACL* results in a 80,000 line verified cryptographic library, written in pure Rust, that implements all modern algorithms - the first of its kind.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 19, 2024

HierSVA: A Data Synthesis Pipeline, Dataset, and Benchmark for LLM-Driven Hierarchical Hardware Formal Verification

We present HierSVA, an integrated suite that combines a pipeline, dataset, and benchmark for LLM-driven hierarchical hardware formal verification. HierSVA-SP pairs an RTL preprocessing toolchain with an LLM-in-the-loop formal verification flow to produce reference SystemVerilog Assertions (SVA) on hierarchical RTL. Applying it to BaseJump STL yields HierSVA-DS, a dataset of 342 modules, with hierarchy metadata and depths 0--9, accompanied by a deep subset of 28 module-bug pairs with natural-language specifications and bug variants. HierSVA-B decomposes assertion quality into six metric axes: syntax correctness, assertion proof success rate, vacuity, specification faithfulness, mutation coverage, and formal core coverage. Applying HierSVA-B to twelve recent LLMs reveals three findings. First, the module-level compile rate is 67.1\%; among generated assertions in evaluable runs, 82.1\% prove non-vacuously, but the corresponding assertion sets detect only 70.2\% of eligible injected faults and cover 36.2\% of the formal core. Second, on 211 evaluable model--module entries in the deep subset, assertion sets flag buggy RTL with 0.87 recall, but 40\% of predicted-buggy outcomes are false positives on correct RTL, limiting precision to 0.60. Third, agentic mode improves S1-style provability and strength metrics, but gains plateau and oscillate. Codes and artifacts are available at https://github.com/HierSVAAnon/HierSVACodeAndArtifacts{https://github.com/HierSVAAnon/HierSVACodeAndArtifacts}. Dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/AnonymousHierSVA/HierSVA{https://huggingface.co/datasets/AnonymousHierSVA/HierSVA}.

  • 8 authors
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Jun 8

Generation-Time vs. Post-hoc Citation: A Holistic Evaluation of LLM Attribution

Trustworthy Large Language Models (LLMs) must cite human-verifiable sources in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, law, academia, and finance, where even small errors can have severe consequences. Practitioners and researchers face a choice: let models generate citations during decoding, or let models draft answers first and then attach appropriate citations. To clarify this choice, we introduce two paradigms: Generation-Time Citation (G-Cite), which produces the answer and citations in one pass, and Post-hoc Citation (P-Cite), which adds or verifies citations after drafting. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation from zero-shot to advanced retrieval-augmented methods across four popular attribution datasets and provide evidence-based recommendations that weigh trade-offs across use cases. Our results show a consistent trade-off between coverage and citation correctness, with retrieval as the main driver of attribution quality in both paradigms. P-Cite methods achieve high coverage with competitive correctness and moderate latency, whereas G-Cite methods prioritize precision at the cost of coverage and speed. We recommend a retrieval-centric, P-Cite-first approach for high-stakes applications, reserving G-Cite for precision-critical settings such as strict claim verification. Our codes and human evaluation results are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Citation_Paradigms-BBB5/

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 25, 2025

A Controlled Candidate-Set Benchmark for Offline Satellite-Security Plan Decomposition

Some security-development settings require local models that map an objective to an ordered, checkable plan. We present a low-rank decomposition adapter and release a case-disjoint corpus with 24 authored decompositions and 83 derived next-step examples across 24 satellite-security cases. To prevent reference-plan leakage, prompts contain one objective and eight shuffled SPARTA candidates. The evaluation candidate sets are constructed with oracle inclusion of every reference technique, so this study measures selection from a controlled set, not retrieval. On six fixed cases and five decoding seeds, mean scores vary across adapters and prompted Qwen2.5 baselines; a separate greedy check over three adapter training seeds shows non-negligible training variance. A 24-fold greedy leave-one-case-out control at the two compact sizes likewise shows tradeoffs: at 1.5B, adapter precision is 0.583 against 0.480 for two-shot prompting, while recall is 0.586 against 0.660. Case-resampling intervals for adapter precision relative to the strongest prompted baseline cross zero at 1.5B and 7B. The adapter is also substantially more format-compliant, which prevents attributing all score differences to selection. Autoregressive next-step accuracy is 0.08, 0.06, and 0.29 at 0.5B, 1.5B, and 7B. We therefore offer the formulation, leakage-controlled dataset, reproducibility package, and descriptive analysis as a proof of concept, not evidence of a reliable stand-alone decomposition system or a general adapter advantage. A separate diagnostic tests contract reuse.

  • 3 authors
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Jul 28

AI Control: Improving Safety Despite Intentional Subversion

As large language models (LLMs) become more powerful and are deployed more autonomously, it will be increasingly important to prevent them from causing harmful outcomes. Researchers have investigated a variety of safety techniques for this purpose, e.g. using models to review the outputs of other models, or red-teaming techniques to surface subtle failure modes. However, researchers have not evaluated whether such techniques still ensure safety if the model is itself intentionally trying to subvert them. In this paper, we develop and evaluate pipelines of safety techniques ("protocols") that are robust to intentional subversion. We investigate a scenario in which we want to solve a sequence of programming problems, using access to a powerful but untrusted model (in our case, GPT-4), access to a less powerful trusted model (in our case, GPT-3.5), and limited access to high-quality trusted labor. We investigate protocols that aim to never submit solutions containing backdoors, which we operationalize here as logical errors that are not caught by test cases. We investigate a range of protocols and test each against strategies that the untrusted model could use to subvert them. One protocol is what we call trusted editing. This protocol first asks GPT-4 to write code, and then asks GPT-3.5 to rate the suspiciousness of that code. If the code is below some suspiciousness threshold, it is submitted. Otherwise, GPT-3.5 edits the solution to remove parts that seem suspicious and then submits the edited code. Another protocol is untrusted monitoring. This protocol asks GPT-4 to write code, and then asks another instance of GPT-4 whether the code is backdoored, using various techniques to prevent the GPT-4 instances from colluding. These protocols improve substantially on simple baselines.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 11, 2023

SABER: Small Actions, Big Errors -- Safeguarding Mutating Steps in LLM Agents

Despite rapid progress in LLM agents, performance on long-horizon, tool-using tasks remains fragile. To better understand this fragility, we ask a simple question: do all actions contribute equally to failure? Analyzing execution traces on τ-Bench (Airline/Retail) and SWE-Bench Verified, we decompose trajectories into mutating (environment-changing) vs.\ non-mutating steps and formalize decisive deviations, earliest action, level divergences that flip success to failure. A logistic regression reveals that each additional deviation in a mutating action reduces the odds of success by upto 92% on Airline and upto 96% on Retail for SoTA models. In contrast, deviations in non-mutating actions have little to no effect. Errors also grow with context length as agents drift from role and act on stale constraints. Motivated by these observations, we introduce , a model-agnostic, gradient-free, test-time safeguard that (i) adds mutation-gated verification, (ii) injects Targeted Reflection before mutating steps, and (iii) performs block-based context cleaning. delivers consistent gains, e.g., Qwen3-Thinking: +28\% relative on Airline, +11\% on Retail, and +7\% on SWE-Bench Verified; Claude: +9\%/+7\%. We further identify ceiling effects in τ-Bench, where annotation errors and underspecified tasks artificially cap model performance. To address this, we release τ-Bench Verified, which restores benchmark headroom through targeted revisions. Our results argue for action-level analysis, targeted safeguards, and reliable evaluations as prerequisites for robust multi-turn agents.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 25, 2025

TrustLLM: Trustworthiness in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs), exemplified by ChatGPT, have gained considerable attention for their excellent natural language processing capabilities. Nonetheless, these LLMs present many challenges, particularly in the realm of trustworthiness. Therefore, ensuring the trustworthiness of LLMs emerges as an important topic. This paper introduces TrustLLM, a comprehensive study of trustworthiness in LLMs, including principles for different dimensions of trustworthiness, established benchmark, evaluation, and analysis of trustworthiness for mainstream LLMs, and discussion of open challenges and future directions. Specifically, we first propose a set of principles for trustworthy LLMs that span eight different dimensions. Based on these principles, we further establish a benchmark across six dimensions including truthfulness, safety, fairness, robustness, privacy, and machine ethics. We then present a study evaluating 16 mainstream LLMs in TrustLLM, consisting of over 30 datasets. Our findings firstly show that in general trustworthiness and utility (i.e., functional effectiveness) are positively related. Secondly, our observations reveal that proprietary LLMs generally outperform most open-source counterparts in terms of trustworthiness, raising concerns about the potential risks of widely accessible open-source LLMs. However, a few open-source LLMs come very close to proprietary ones. Thirdly, it is important to note that some LLMs may be overly calibrated towards exhibiting trustworthiness, to the extent that they compromise their utility by mistakenly treating benign prompts as harmful and consequently not responding. Finally, we emphasize the importance of ensuring transparency not only in the models themselves but also in the technologies that underpin trustworthiness. Knowing the specific trustworthy technologies that have been employed is crucial for analyzing their effectiveness.

  • 67 authors
·
Jan 10, 2024 3

SCI-Verifier: Scientific Verifier with Thinking

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to scientific reasoning, the complexity of answer formats and the diversity of equivalent expressions make answer verification a critical yet challenging task. Existing verification studies in scientific domains suffer from two major limitations: (a) the absence of systematic evaluation standards and insufficient disciplinary coverage, which hinders their comprehensive assessment; and (b) heavy reliance on cumbersome rule design or prompt engineering, which reduces their effectiveness in complex reasoning scenarios or limits their cross-disciplinary generalization. To address these challenges, we propose solutions at both the data and model levels. On the data side, we construct SCI-VerifyBench, a cross-disciplinary benchmark covering mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, and general scientific QA. The benchmark is built from real LLM responses and enhanced with domain-specific equivalence transformations that generate challenging and realistic data. Model-based and expert annotations ensure both quality and diversity, enabling rigorous evaluation of verification ability. On the model side, we emphasize the importance of reasoning for verification and introduce SCI-Verifier, a unified reasoning-augmented verifier for scientific domains. Through post-training, SCI-Verifier demonstrates strong logical reasoning and equivalence judgment capabilities while maintaining concise and stable outputs. Together, SCI-VerifyBench and SCI-Verifier provide a principled framework for scientific verification, offering both systematic evaluation and practical pathways to enhance the reliability and applicability of LLMs in scientific domains.

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 29, 2025 1

Towards Neural Synthesis for SMT-Assisted Proof-Oriented Programming

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

  • 7 authors
·
May 2, 2024

ScientistOne: Towards Human-Level Autonomous Research via Chain-of-Evidence

Autonomous research agents produce competitive solutions and professional-looking manuscripts, yet their outputs contain verifiability failures undetectable by surface-level evaluation: fabricated citations, unreproducible scores, and method descriptions that diverge from the implementation. We address this through three contributions. First, Chain-of-Evidence (CoE), a verifiability framework requiring every claim to be traceable to its evidence source. Second, ScientistOne, an end-to-end autonomous research system that maintains evidence chains by construction throughout literature review, solution discovery, and paper writing. Third, CoE Audit, a post-hoc audit whose four integrity checks -- score verification, specification violation, reference verification, and method-code alignment -- apply uniformly to all systems. Across 75 papers spanning five systems and five frontier research tasks, every baseline exhibits at least one systematic failure mode: hallucinated reference rates reach 21%, score verification passes in as few as 42% of papers, and method-code alignment ranges from 20% to 80%. ScientistOne achieves zero hallucinated references (0/337), perfect score verification (12/12), and the highest method-code alignment (14/15), while matching or exceeding human expert performance on all five tasks. ScientistOne further generalizes to six additional tasks spanning medical imaging, fine-grained recognition, 3D perception, and language modeling, achieving state-of-the-art on Parameter Golf and gold medals on MLE-Bench tasks where baselines fail entirely.

google Google
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May 24 2

HumanEval Pro and MBPP Pro: Evaluating Large Language Models on Self-invoking Code Generation

We introduce self-invoking code generation, a new task designed to evaluate the progressive reasoning and problem-solving capabilities of LLMs. In this task, models are presented with a base problem and a related, more complex problem. They must solve the base problem and then utilize its solution to address the more complex one. This work features three key contributions. First, we propose a general recipe for generating more challenging versions of existing benchmarks, resulting in three new benchmarks: HumanEval Pro, MBPP Pro, and BigCodeBench-Lite Pro, specifically designed to assess LLMs on self-invoking code generation. Second, from the analysis of experimental results over twenty LLMs on our benchmarks, we have two important observations: (i) Most LLMs excel in traditional code generation benchmarks like HumanEval and MBPP, but their performance declines on self-invoking tasks. For example, o1-mini achieves 96.2% pass@1 on HumanEval but only 76.2% on HumanEval Pro. (ii) On self-invoking code generation task, the instruction-tuned models demonstrate only marginal improvements compared to the base models. Third, we disclose the types of failure modes that exist in our evaluation results. All these results underscore the need for further advancements in self-invoking code generation tasks and provide a new direction for future research on enhancing LLMs' code reasoning capabilities.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 30, 2024 3

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

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

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 21, 2025

Precision Is Not Faithfulness: Coverage-Aware Evaluation of Grounded Generation with a Complete Oracle

Reference-free faithfulness metrics verify each atomic claim a model makes against ground truth, and are increasingly used to evaluate grounded generation. We show they share a blind spot: they measure only precision -- are the stated claims supported? -- and therefore reward abstention, since a model can score near-perfect faithfulness by saying almost nothing. We make this measurable using Formula 1 telemetry, a domain where strategic ground truth is derived deterministically and, crucially, completely: for each decision we know the full set of facts that mattered. This completeness -- absent in open-domain faithfulness benchmarks -- lets us measure recall (coverage of the relevant facts) exactly, alongside precision. On a multilingual (EN/ES/PT) benchmark of 7,253 decision instances spanning 150 races, the most precise frontier model covers under half of the relevant facts and ranks last by F1, so requiring coverage reorders the systems; the same effect reappears in a second complete-oracle domain (NOAA weather forecasts). A prompt ablation shows the low coverage is not an under-prompting artifact: explicitly asking models to be thorough does not close the gap. We pair faithfulness with coverage into a single score, validate the metric (controlled perturbation; agreement across a model-free regex extractor and a cross-family LLM extractor, system-level Spearman 1.0), and give a verifier-guided generation method that improves precision and recall without references. We release the benchmark, structured annotations, metric, baselines, and an interactive demo.

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