MerLean: An Agentic Framework for Autoformalization in Quantum Computation
Organizations: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA 02139 · Northeastern University Boston, MA 02115
Abstract
We introduce MerLean, a fully automated agentic framework for autoformalization in quantum computation. MerLean extracts mathematical statements from \LaTeX{} source files, formalizes them into verified Lean~4 code built on Mathlib, and translates the result back into human-readable \LaTeX{} for semantic review. We evaluate MerLean on three theoretical quantum computing papers producing 2,050 Lean declarations from 114 statements in total. MerLean achieves end-to-end formalization on all three papers, reducing the verification burden to only the newly introduced definitions and axioms. Our results demonstrate that agentic autoformalization can scale to frontier research, offering both a practical tool for machine-verified peer review and a scalable engine for mining high-quality synthetic data to train future reasoning models. Our approach can also be generalized to any other rigorous research in mathematics and theoretical physics.
Figures & tables
| Paper | Statements | Lines of Lean | Declarations | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Balanced Product | 44 | 14,997 | 730 | 20h 4m |
| Fault-Tolerant QC | 47 | 18,557 | 923 | 11h 41m |
| Quantum Topology | 23 | 7,761 | 397 | 7h 51m |
| Type | Count | Avg. Time | Avg. Compiles |
|---|---|---|---|
| Definition | 49 | 18m 0s | 11.7 |
| Theorem | 15 | 39m 41s | 22.4 |
| Lemma | 20 | 33m 22s | 18.3 |
| Remark | 26 | 10m 34s | 7.1 |
| Corollary | 4 | 19m 23s | 5.5 |
| Total/Avg | 114 | 21m 54s | 13.0 |