Authors: Tony Feng, Junehyuk Jung, Sang-hyun Kim, Carlo Pagano, Sergei Gukov, Chiang-Chiang Tsai, David Woodruff, Adel Javanmard, Aryan Mokhtari, Dawsen Hwang, Yuri Chervonyi, Jonathan N. Lee, Garrett Bingham, Trieu H. Trinh, Vahab Mirrokni, Quoc V. Le, Thang Luong
Organizations: Google DeepMind · UC Berkeley · Brown University · Korea Institute for Advanced Study · Concordia University · Caltech · Academia Sinica · CMU · USC · UT Austin
We report the performance of Aletheia (Feng et al., 2026b), a mathematics research agent powered by Gemini 3 Deep Think, on the inaugural FirstProof challenge. Within the allowed timeframe of the challenge, Aletheia autonomously solved 6 problems (2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10) out of 10 according to majority expert assessments; we note that experts were not unanimous on Problem 8 (only). For full transparency, we explain our interpretation of FirstProof and disclose details about our experiments as well as our evaluation. Raw prompts and outputs are available at https://github.com/google-deepmind/superhuman/tree/main/aletheia.
Figures & tables
Aletheia (best of 2)
Expert Evaluation (correct/total)
P1
No Output
P2
Correct
4/4
P3
No Output
P4
No Output
P5
Correct
4/4
P6
No Output
Table 1: Summary of Aletheia ’s performance on FirstProof . The Expert Evaluation column displays the number of experts who rated the solution as being Correct, out of the total number of experts consulted. Only the assessment on P8 was not unanimous.
Aletheia A
Aletheia B
Zulip
P1
No output
No output
P2
Correct
Correct
Link
P3
No output
No output
P4
No output
No output
P5
Correct
Misinterpreted
Link
P6
No output
No output
Table 2: Our current ( post-deadline ) estimation of the results based on the consensus of expert assessments. On P8, the expert assessment was not unanimous. We include links with public comments (on Zulip) for individual problems.
Figure 1: Plot of the inference cost per FirstProof problem, as a multiple of the inference cost of the solution to Erdős-1051 from ( Feng et al., 2026a ) .
Appendix figures & tables1 asset
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Deprecated (pre-deadline) evaluations
Aletheia A
Aletheia Af
Aletheia B
P1
N/A
N/A
N/A
P2
Correct
Correct
?
P3
N/A
N/A
Filtered out
P4
N/A
N/A
N/A
P5
Correct
N/A
?
Appendix
Table 3: Our pre-deadline estimation of the results, as sent to the FirstProof authors at 11:07pm PST on February 13. Correct = our first choice solution. Incorrect = we are confident it is incorrect. Filtered out = filtered by the additional verification and extraction prompt. ? = ran for ablation purposes on Friday evening; not read before the deadline. Aletheia A is Aletheia with Gemini 3 Deep Think as base model. Aletheia Af is an extended generation variant of Aletheia A. Aletheia B is Aletheia with base model B, from §2 of ( Feng et al., 2026b ) . ‘N/A’ indicates either Aletheia returned “No solution found” or failed to return a solution within the time limit.
Long-horizon mathematical reasoning fails less often because a model cannot produce a valid next step than because an agent fails to maintain and expose the right semantic state across many iterations. Left unmanaged, this produces research-level proofs that are locally convincing yet globally incomplete: a key lemma unproved, an assumption unchecked, a citation unsupported, or a computational claim unverified. We present Research Math Agents (RMA), an agentic framework for long-horizon proof development built around a persistent, typed research store and an orchestrator that compiles operation-specific context from that store. The Research Context Orchestrator is the central state-management layer between the persistent research store and each locally scoped proof operation: it retrieves task-relevant artifacts, compiles them into a bounded context, invokes the appropriate operation, and writes the resulting proof edits, issue updates, literature notes, plans, or evaluations back to the store. This process is designed to keep proof revisions, unresolved issues, prior attempts, literature, and evaluations available across rounds while exposing only task-relevant state to each local operation. We evaluate RMA across complementary research-level settings using independent expert evaluation, blind mathematician review, LLM-based benchmark evaluation, and Lean 4 kernel verification. RMA achieves a 42.5% solve rate on the independently evaluated SOOHAK Challenge Hard set, obtains 8 of 10 correct solutions on First Proof B1 and 8 of 10 passing solutions on B2 under human-expert evaluation, and verifies 213 of 300 sampled Research Solved targets in Formal Conjectures with the Lean 4 kernel.
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly excel at mathematical reasoning, but their unreliability limits their utility in mathematics research. A mitigation is using LLMs to generate formal proofs in languages like Lean. We perform the first large-scale evaluation of this method's ability to solve open problems. Our most capable agent autonomously resolved 9 of 353 open Erdős problems at the per-problem cost of a few hundred dollars, proved 44/492 OEIS conjectures, and is being deployed in combinatorics, optimization, graph theory, algebraic geometry, and quantum optics research. A basic agent alternating LLM-based generation with Lean-based verification replicated the Erdős successes but proved costlier on the hardest problems. These findings demonstrate the power of AI-aided formal proof search and shed light on the agent designs that enable it.
George Tsoukalas, Anton Kovsharov, Sergey Shirobokov +18
Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing promise in solving open problems in mathematics. However, their performance can be further improved through agentic workflows tailored to real-world mathematical practice. To this end, we introduce ProofCouncil, a mathematical agent that is designed to tackle open problems using an author-critic architecture. ProofCouncil served as a submission to the second batch of FirstProof, a challenge consisting of 10 real-world mathematical problems that agents must solve autonomously. Its submissions for 6 of the 10 problems were judged by the referees to be correct up to at most minor revisions, showing the best performance among participating teams. We also evaluate ProofCouncil on 30 open problems collected from mathematical researchers. Among the 21 solutions that received human feedback, 5 were judged completely correct, 2 more were judged promising pending final verification, and a further 8 contained useful partial progress. In this short paper, we describe the development of ProofCouncil and the agent-building library used to create it, which we release as open source to the community.
Johannes Schmitt, Tim Gehrunger, Jasper Dekoninck +4
ETH Zurich · Aarhus University · Independent Researcher +1