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Apr 20

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

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

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 17, 2025 1

Yet another argument in favour of NP=CoNP

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

  • 1 authors
·
Dec 28, 2020

P-FOLIO: Evaluating and Improving Logical Reasoning with Abundant Human-Written Reasoning Chains

Existing methods on understanding the capabilities of LLMs in logical reasoning rely on binary entailment classification or synthetically derived rationales, which are not sufficient for proper investigation of model's capabilities. We present P-FOLIO, a human-annotated dataset consisting of diverse and complex reasoning chains for a set of realistic logical reasoning stories also written by humans. P-FOLIO is collected with an annotation protocol that facilitates humans to annotate well-structured natural language proofs for first-order logic reasoning problems in a step-by-step manner. The number of reasoning steps in P-FOLIO span from 0 to 20. We further use P-FOLIO to evaluate and improve large-language-model (LLM) reasoning capabilities. We evaluate LLM reasoning capabilities at a fine granularity via single-step inference rule classification, with more diverse inference rules of more diverse and higher levels of complexities than previous works. Given that a single model-generated reasoning chain could take a completely different path than the human-annotated one, we sample multiple reasoning chains from a model and use pass@k metrics for evaluating the quality of model-generated reasoning chains. We show that human-written reasoning chains significantly boost the logical reasoning capabilities of LLMs via many-shot prompting and fine-tuning. Furthermore, fine-tuning Llama3-7B on P-FOLIO improves the model performance by 10% or more on three other out-of-domain logical reasoning datasets. We also conduct detailed analysis to show where most powerful LLMs fall short in reasoning. We will release the dataset and code publicly.

  • 16 authors
·
Oct 11, 2024

Reliable Fine-Grained Evaluation of Natural Language Math Proofs

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) for mathematical reasoning have largely focused on tasks with easily verifiable final answers; however, generating and verifying natural language math proofs remains an open challenge. We identify the absence of a reliable, fine-grained evaluator for LLM-generated math proofs as a critical gap. To address this, we propose a systematic methodology for developing and validating evaluators that assign fine-grained scores on a 0-7 scale to model-generated math proofs. To enable this study, we introduce ProofBench, the first expert-annotated dataset of fine-grained proof ratings, spanning 145 problems from six major math competitions (USAMO, IMO, Putnam, etc) and 435 LLM-generated solutions from Gemini-2.5-pro, o3, and DeepSeek-R1. %with expert gradings. Using ProofBench as a testbed, we systematically explore the evaluator design space across key axes: the backbone model, input context, instructions and evaluation workflow. Our analysis delivers ProofGrader, an evaluator that combines a strong reasoning backbone LM, rich context from reference solutions and marking schemes, and a simple ensembling method; it achieves a low Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.926 against expert scores, significantly outperforming naive baselines. Finally, we demonstrate its practical utility in a best-of-n selection task: at n=16, ProofGrader achieves an average score of 4.14 (out of 7), closing 78% of the gap between a naive binary evaluator (2.48) and the human oracle (4.62), highlighting its potential to advance downstream proof generation.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 13, 2025

TheoremLlama: Transforming General-Purpose LLMs into Lean4 Experts

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

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 3, 2024 1

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

Herald: A Natural Language Annotated Lean 4 Dataset

Verifiable formal languages like Lean have profoundly impacted mathematical reasoning, particularly through the use of large language models (LLMs) for automated reasoning. A significant challenge in training LLMs for these formal languages is the lack of parallel datasets that align natural language with formal language proofs. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a novel framework for translating the Mathlib4 corpus (a unified library of mathematics in formal language Lean 4) into natural language. Building upon this, we employ a dual augmentation strategy that combines tactic-based and informal-based approaches, leveraging the Lean-jixia system, a Lean 4 analyzer. We present the results of this pipeline on Mathlib4 as Herald (Hierarchy and Retrieval-based Translated Lean Dataset). We also propose the Herald Translator, which is fine-tuned on Herald. Herald translator achieves a 93.2% accuracy (Pass@128) on formalizing statements in the miniF2F-test and a 22.5% accuracy on our internal graduate-level textbook dataset, outperforming InternLM2-Math-Plus-7B (74.0% and 7.5%) and TheoremLlama (50.1% and 4.0%). Furthermore, we propose a section-level translation framework for real-world applications. As a direct application of Herald translator, we have successfully translated a template section in the Stack project, marking a notable progress in the automatic formalization of graduate-level mathematical literature. Our model, along with the datasets, will be open-sourced to the public soon.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 9, 2024

Hilbert: Recursively Building Formal Proofs with Informal Reasoning

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

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 26, 2025

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

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

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

deepseek-ai DeepSeek
·
May 23, 2024 6

Mathematical Capabilities of ChatGPT

We investigate the mathematical capabilities of ChatGPT by testing it on publicly available datasets, as well as hand-crafted ones, and measuring its performance against other models trained on a mathematical corpus, such as Minerva. We also test whether ChatGPT can be a useful assistant to professional mathematicians by emulating various use cases that come up in the daily professional activities of mathematicians (question answering, theorem searching). In contrast to formal mathematics, where large databases of formal proofs are available (e.g., the Lean Mathematical Library), current datasets of natural-language mathematics, used to benchmark language models, only cover elementary mathematics. We address this issue by introducing a new dataset: GHOSTS. It is the first natural-language dataset made and curated by working researchers in mathematics that (1) aims to cover graduate-level mathematics and (2) provides a holistic overview of the mathematical capabilities of language models. We benchmark ChatGPT on GHOSTS and evaluate performance against fine-grained criteria. We make this new dataset publicly available to assist a community-driven comparison of ChatGPT with (future) large language models in terms of advanced mathematical comprehension. We conclude that contrary to many positive reports in the media (a potential case of selection bias), ChatGPT's mathematical abilities are significantly below those of an average mathematics graduate student. Our results show that ChatGPT often understands the question but fails to provide correct solutions. Hence, if your goal is to use it to pass a university exam, you would be better off copying from your average peer!

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 31, 2023

FormalGeo: An Extensible Formalized Framework for Olympiad Geometric Problem Solving

This is the first paper in a series of work we have accomplished over the past three years. In this paper, we have constructed a consistent formal plane geometry system. This will serve as a crucial bridge between IMO-level plane geometry challenges and readable AI automated reasoning. Within this formal framework, we have been able to seamlessly integrate modern AI models with our formal system. AI is now capable of providing deductive reasoning solutions to IMO-level plane geometry problems, just like handling other natural languages, and these proofs are readable, traceable, and verifiable. We propose the geometry formalization theory (GFT) to guide the development of the geometry formal system. Based on the GFT, we have established the FormalGeo, which consists of 88 geometric predicates and 196 theorems. It can represent, validate, and solve IMO-level geometry problems. we also have crafted the FGPS (formal geometry problem solver) in Python. It serves as both an interactive assistant for verifying problem-solving processes and an automated problem solver. We've annotated the formalgeo7k and formalgeo-imo datasets. The former contains 6,981 (expand to 133,818 through data augmentation) geometry problems, while the latter includes 18 (expand to 2,627 and continuously increasing) IMO-level challenging geometry problems. All annotated problems include detailed formal language descriptions and solutions. Implementation of the formal system and experiments validate the correctness and utility of the GFT. The backward depth-first search method only yields a 2.42% problem-solving failure rate, and we can incorporate deep learning techniques to achieve lower one. The source code of FGPS and datasets are available at https://github.com/BitSecret/FGPS.

  • 20 authors
·
Oct 27, 2023

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

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

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 4, 2025

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

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

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 13, 2025

Generative Logic: A New Computer Architecture for Deterministic Reasoning and Knowledge Generation

We present Generative Logic (GL), a deterministic architecture that begins from user-supplied axiomatic definitions -- written in a minimalist Mathematical Programming Language (MPL) -- and systematically explores their deductive neighborhood. Definitions are compiled into a distributed grid of simple Logic Blocks (LBs) that exchange messages; any time several expressions unify under an inference rule, a new fact is emitted with full provenance to its sources, yielding replayable, auditable proof graphs. A prototype software implementation instantiates the workflow on first-order Peano arithmetic. Starting only from the Peano axioms, GL enumerates candidate implications, applies normalization and type filters, and automatically reconstructs machine-checkable proofs of foundational arithmetic laws including associativity and commutativity of addition, associativity and commutativity of multiplication, and distributivity. Generated proofs export to navigable HTML so that every inference step can be inspected independently. We outline a hardware-software co-design path toward massively parallel realizations and describe prospective integration with probabilistic models (e.g., Large Language Models (LLMs)) for autoformalization and conjecture seeding. The Python and MPL code to reproduce the Peano experiments, along with the full HTML proof graphs, are available in the project's GitHub repository at https://github.com/Generative-Logic/GL/tree/35a111ea9ba53afe051703d6050be0c3923e9724 and are permanently archived at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16408441. We invite community feedback and collaboration.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 25, 2025

Alchemy: Amplifying Theorem-Proving Capability through Symbolic Mutation

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

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 21, 2024 3

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

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

  • 13 authors
·
Feb 11, 2025 2

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

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

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 24, 2025

FormalMATH: Benchmarking Formal Mathematical Reasoning of Large Language Models

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

  • 13 authors
·
May 5, 2025 1

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

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

  • 5 authors
·
May 23, 2025

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

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

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 18, 2024

Mathematical Proof as a Litmus Test: Revealing Failure Modes of Advanced Large Reasoning Models

Large reasoning models (e.g., R1, o3) have demonstrated remarkable mathematical problem-solving abilities. However, the high reported accuracy of these advanced models on popular datasets, reliance on purely numerical evaluation and potential benchmark leakage, often masks their true reasoning shortcomings. To address this, we propose leveraging the inherent rigor and methodological complexity of mathematical proofs as a diagnostic tool to expose these hidden failures. Specifically, we introduce the RFMDataset (Reveal Failure Modes), a collection of 200 diverse mathematical proof problems, and thoroughly evaluate advanced models' performance on it. Our in-depth analysis of their failures uncovers 10 fine-grained error types, which shows fundamental limitations in current large reasoning models: 1) large reasoning models grapple profoundly with mathematical proofs, with some generating entirely correct proofs for less than 20% of problems and failing even on basic ones; 2) models exhibit a diverse spectrum of reasoning failures, prominently demonstrating the lack of guarantees for the correctness and rigor of single-step reasoning; and 3) models show hallucination and incompleteness during the reasoning process. Our findings reveal that models' self-reflection is insufficient to resolve the current logical dilemmas, necessitating formalized and fine-grained logical training.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 20, 2025

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
·
Feb 14

A Lean Dataset for International Math Olympiad: Small Steps towards Writing Math Proofs for Hard Problems

Using AI to write formal proofs for mathematical problems is a challenging task that has seen some advancements in recent years. Automated systems such as Lean can verify the correctness of proofs written in formal language, yet writing the proofs in formal language can be challenging for humans and machines. The miniF2F benchmark has 20 IMO problems in its test set, yet formal proofs are available only for 6 of these problems (3 of which are only written by mathematicians). The model with best accuracy can only prove 2 of these 20 IMO problems, from 1950s and 60s, while its training set is a secret. In this work, we write complete, original formal proofs for the remaining IMO problems in Lean along with 3 extra problems from IMO 2022 and 2023. This effort expands the availability of proof currently in the public domain by creating 5,880 lines of Lean proof. The goal of the paper is to pave the way for developing AI models that can automatically write the formal proofs for all the IMO problems in miniF2F and beyond by providing an evaluation benchmark. In this pursuit, we devise a method to decompose the proofs of these problems into their building blocks, constructing a dataset of 1,329 lemmas with more than 40k lines of Lean code. These lemmas are not trivial, yet they are approachable, providing the opportunity to evaluate and diagnose the failures and successes of AI models. We evaluate the ability of the SOTA LLMs on our dataset and analyze their success and failure modes from different perspectives. Our dataset and code is available at: https://github.com/roozbeh-yz/IMO-Steps.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 27, 2024

Deductive Verification of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly benefit from Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting in performing various reasoning tasks. While CoT allows models to produce more comprehensive reasoning processes, its emphasis on intermediate reasoning steps can inadvertently introduce hallucinations and accumulated errors, thereby limiting models' ability to solve complex reasoning tasks. Inspired by how humans engage in careful and meticulous deductive logical reasoning processes to solve tasks, we seek to enable language models to perform explicit and rigorous deductive reasoning, and also ensure the trustworthiness of their reasoning process through self-verification. However, directly verifying the validity of an entire deductive reasoning process is challenging, even with advanced models like ChatGPT. In light of this, we propose to decompose a reasoning verification process into a series of step-by-step subprocesses, each only receiving their necessary context and premises. To facilitate this procedure, we propose Natural Program, a natural language-based deductive reasoning format. Our approach enables models to generate precise reasoning steps where subsequent steps are more rigorously grounded on prior steps. It also empowers language models to carry out reasoning self-verification in a step-by-step manner. By integrating this verification process into each deductive reasoning stage, we significantly enhance the rigor and trustfulness of generated reasoning steps. Along this process, we also improve the answer correctness on complex reasoning tasks. Code will be released at https://github.com/lz1oceani/verify_cot.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 6, 2023

Proof2Hybrid: Automatic Mathematical Benchmark Synthesis for Proof-Centric Problems

Evaluating the mathematical capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a critical yet challenging frontier. Existing benchmarks fall short, particularly for proof-centric problems, as manual creation is unscalable and costly, leaving the true mathematical abilities of LLMs largely unassessed. To overcome these barriers, we propose Proof2Hybrid, the first fully automated framework that synthesizes high-quality, proof-centric benchmarks from natural language mathematical corpora. The key novelty of our solution is Proof2X, a roadmap of converting mathematical proofs into various kinds of questions that are easy to verify. Instructed by this roadmap, we propose a new type of hybrid-formatted questions, named ``m-out-of-n multiple judge questions'', specifically designed to enable robust, automatic evaluation while being resilient to guessing and superficial pattern matching inherent in traditional formats. As a demonstration of our framework, we introduce AlgGeoTest, a benchmark for algebraic geometry--a frontier domain of modern mathematics--comprising 456 challenging items. Our extensive evaluations on state-of-the-art LLMs using AlgGeoTest reveal profound deficits in their comprehension of algebraic geometry, providing a more precise measure of their true mathematical capabilities. Our framework and benchmark pave the way for a new wave of in-depth research into the mathematical intelligence of AI systems.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 4, 2025

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

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

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 5

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

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

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 31, 2025

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

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

Language Models as Inductive Reasoners

Inductive reasoning is a core component of human intelligence. In the past research of inductive reasoning within computer science, formal language is used as representations of knowledge (facts and rules, more specifically). However, formal language can cause systematic problems for inductive reasoning such as disability of handling raw input such as natural language, sensitiveness to mislabeled data, and incapacity to handle ambiguous input. To this end, we propose a new paradigm (task) for inductive reasoning, which is to induce natural language rules from natural language facts, and create a dataset termed DEER containing 1.2k rule-fact pairs for the task, where rules and facts are written in natural language. New automatic metrics are also proposed and analysed for the evaluation of this task. With DEER, we investigate a modern approach for inductive reasoning where we use natural language as representation for knowledge instead of formal language and use pretrained language models as ''reasoners''. Moreover, we provide the first and comprehensive analysis of how well pretrained language models can induce natural language rules from natural language facts. We also propose a new framework drawing insights from philosophy literature for this task, which we show in the experiment section that surpasses baselines in both automatic and human evaluations. We discuss about our future perspectives for inductive reasoning in Section 7. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/ZonglinY/Inductive_Reasoning.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 21, 2022

MUSTARD: Mastering Uniform Synthesis of Theorem and Proof Data

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

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 14, 2024

Boule or Baguette? A Study on Task Topology, Length Generalization, and the Benefit of Reasoning Traces

Recent years have witnessed meteoric progress in reasoning models: neural networks that generate intermediate reasoning traces (RTs) before producing a final output. Despite the rapid advancement, our understanding of how RTs support reasoning, and the limits of this paradigm, remain incomplete. To promote greater clarity, we introduce PITA: a novel large-scale dataset of over 23 million statements in propositional logic and their corresponding proofs. As a benchmark for robust reasoning, we focus on length generalization: if a model is trained to determine truth or falsity on statements with proofs up to fixed length, how well does it generalize to statements requiring longer proofs? We propose notions of (1) task depth and (2) task breadth, which measure respectively (1) the number of steps required to solve an example from a task and (2) the number of unique examples across a task. We vary these quantities across subsets of PITA, and find that RT models generalize well on broad and shallow subsets, while deteriorating on narrow and deep subsets relative to non-RT baselines. To determine whether our results are idiosyncratic to PITA or indicative of general phenomena, we compare our results to a simple synthetic task based on syllogisms. Our resulting theory suggests fundamental scalings that limit how well RT models perform on deep tasks, and highlights their generalization strengths on broad tasks. Our findings overall identify fundamental benefits and limitations inherent in using reasoning traces.

  • 3 authors
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Feb 15

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

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

  • 5 authors
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Mar 15 2

PhysProver: Advancing Automatic Theorem Proving for Physics

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

  • 6 authors
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Jan 22

AI for Mathematics: Progress, Challenges, and Prospects

AI for Mathematics (AI4Math) has emerged as a distinct field that leverages machine learning to navigate mathematical landscapes historically intractable for early symbolic systems. While mid-20th-century symbolic approaches successfully automated formal logic, they faced severe scalability limitations due to the combinatorial explosion of the search space. The recent integration of data-driven approaches has revitalized this pursuit. In this review, we provide a systematic overview of AI4Math, highlighting its primary focus on developing AI models to support mathematical research. Crucially, we emphasize that this is not merely the application of AI to mathematical activities; it also encompasses the development of stronger AI systems where the rigorous nature of mathematics serves as a premier testbed for advancing general reasoning capabilities. We categorize existing research into two complementary directions: problem-specific modeling, involving the design of specialized architectures for distinct mathematical tasks, and general-purpose modeling, focusing on foundation models capable of broader reasoning, retrieval, and exploratory workflows. We conclude by discussing key challenges and prospects, advocating for AI systems that go beyond facilitating formal correctness to enabling the discovery of meaningful results and unified theories, recognizing that the true value of a proof lies in the insights and tools it offers to the broader mathematical landscape.

  • 2 authors
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Jan 19

LeanDojo: Theorem Proving with Retrieval-Augmented Language Models

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

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 27, 2023

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

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

  • 4 authors
·
May 21, 2025

LINC: A Neurosymbolic Approach for Logical Reasoning by Combining Language Models with First-Order Logic Provers

Logical reasoning, i.e., deductively inferring the truth value of a conclusion from a set of premises, is an important task for artificial intelligence with wide potential impacts on science, mathematics, and society. While many prompting-based strategies have been proposed to enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to do such reasoning more effectively, they still appear unsatisfactory, often failing in subtle and unpredictable ways. In this work, we investigate the validity of instead reformulating such tasks as modular neurosymbolic programming, which we call LINC: Logical Inference via Neurosymbolic Computation. In LINC, the LLM acts as a semantic parser, translating premises and conclusions from natural language to expressions in first-order logic. These expressions are then offloaded to an external theorem prover, which symbolically performs deductive inference. Leveraging this approach, we observe significant performance gains on FOLIO and a balanced subset of ProofWriter for three different models in nearly all experimental conditions we evaluate. On ProofWriter, augmenting the comparatively small open-source StarCoder+ (15.5B parameters) with LINC even outperforms GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting by an absolute 38% and 10%, respectively. When used with GPT-4, LINC scores 26% higher than CoT on ProofWriter while performing comparatively on FOLIO. Further analysis reveals that although both methods on average succeed roughly equally often on this dataset, they exhibit distinct and complementary failure modes. We thus provide promising evidence for how logical reasoning over natural language can be tackled through jointly leveraging LLMs alongside symbolic provers. All corresponding code is publicly available at https://github.com/benlipkin/linc

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 23, 2023

DeepSeekMath-V2: Towards Self-Verifiable Mathematical Reasoning

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

deepseek-ai DeepSeek
·
Nov 27, 2025 4

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

LeanProgress: Guiding Search for Neural Theorem Proving via Proof Progress Prediction

Mathematical reasoning remains a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs) due to hallucinations. When combined with formal proof assistants like Lean, these hallucinations can be eliminated through rigorous verification, making theorem proving reliable. However, even with formal verification, LLMs still struggle with long proofs and complex mathematical formalizations. While Lean with LLMs offers valuable assistance with retrieving lemmas, generating tactics, or even complete proofs, it lacks a crucial capability: providing a sense of proof progress. This limitation particularly impacts the overall development efficiency in large formalization projects. We introduce LeanProgress, a method that predicts the progress in the proof. Training and evaluating our models made on a large corpus of Lean proofs from Lean Workbook Plus and Mathlib4 and how many steps remain to complete it, we employ data preprocessing and balancing techniques to handle the skewed distribution of proof lengths. Our experiments show that LeanProgress achieves an overall prediction accuracy of 75.1\% in predicting the amount of progress and, hence, the remaining number of steps. When integrated into a best-first search framework using Reprover, our method shows a 3.8\% improvement on Mathlib4 compared to baseline performances of 41.2\%, particularly for longer proofs. These results demonstrate how proof progress prediction can enhance both automated and interactive theorem proving, enabling users to make more informed decisions about proof strategies.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 25, 2025

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

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

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 14, 2025

APOLLO: Automated LLM and Lean Collaboration for Advanced Formal Reasoning

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

  • 3 authors
·
May 8, 2025

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

Enhancing Formal Theorem Proving: A Comprehensive Dataset for Training AI Models on Coq Code

In the realm of formal theorem proving, the Coq proof assistant stands out for its rigorous approach to verifying mathematical assertions and software correctness. Despite the advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, the specialized nature of Coq syntax and semantics poses unique challenges for Large Language Models (LLMs). Addressing this gap, we present a comprehensive dataset specifically designed to enhance LLMs' proficiency in interpreting and generating Coq code. This dataset, derived from a collection of over 10,000 Coq source files, encompasses a wide array of propositions, proofs, and definitions, enriched with metadata including source references and licensing information. Our primary aim is to facilitate the development of LLMs capable of generating syntactically correct and semantically meaningful Coq constructs, thereby advancing the frontier of automated theorem proving. Initial experiments with this dataset have showcased its significant potential; models trained on this data exhibited enhanced accuracy in Coq code generation. Notably, a particular experiment revealed that a fine-tuned LLM was capable of generating 141 valid proofs for a basic lemma, highlighting the dataset's utility in facilitating the discovery of diverse and valid proof strategies. This paper discusses the dataset's composition, the methodology behind its creation, and the implications of our findings for the future of machine learning in formal verification. The dataset is accessible for further research and exploration: https://huggingface.co/datasets/florath/coq-facts-props-proofs-gen0-v1

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Mar 19, 2024