STAR-PólyaMath: Multi-Agent Reasoning under Persistent Meta-Strategic Supervision

Mathematical reasoning has long served as a stringent test of machine intelligence; over the past decade, it has moved from a niche problem within NLP to one of the most consequential AI frontiers. This survey provides a unified account of the field's evolution, from early rule-based math word problem (MWP) solvers and template-driven geometry systems, through neural expression generation and LLM prompting, to contemporary reasoning models, multi-agent systems, neuro-symbolic theorem provers, and verified discovery workflows. We organize the landscape along four axes: (i) informal reasoning over text and diagrams, spanning MWP solving, multimodal geometry, and VLMs; (ii) formal reasoning in proof assistants, including autoformalization, tactic prediction, compiler-guided repair, and proof search; (iii) mathematical discovery, where systems propose constructions, improve bounds, or assist attacks on open problems; and (iv) the inference and training-time techniques, including CoT prompting, tool use, process reward models, and RLVR, that increasingly connect generation with verification. We catalog major benchmarks across grade-school arithmetic, competition mathematics, geometry, formal proving, multimodal and multilingual reasoning, and expert evaluation, and we examine benchmark saturation, contamination, reporting mismatches, and the distinction between pass@1, majority voting, and verifier-assisted pass@$k$. We critically assess failure modes: brittleness under perturbation, reward hacking, multimodal grounding failures, fragile formalization, and the energy cost of reasoning-scale inference. Drawing on recent perspectives from working mathematicians, we identify future directions centered on verified-discovery workflows, reasoning efficiency, and infrastructure to make AI-assisted formalization broadly usable. Companion materials: https://github.com/Starscream-11813/awesome-AI4Math.

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

AI reasoning has become a central focus in contemporary artificial intelligence, largely driven by the success of large language models. However, mathematical research, which is characterized by non-linear derivation paths, rigorous logical requirements, and protracted exploration cycles, poses severe challenges for existing reasoning systems. To overcome these limitations, we present the MechMath Agent Team (MMAT), which is a large language model driven agent designed to serve as a co-pilot throughout the full cycle of mathematical research. We design a tripartite Harness Architecture that decouples system responsibilities into Control, Execution, and Augmentation planes, thereby reconciling rigorous logical control with the agility demanded by open-ended research. Building upon this framework, we instantiate three specialized agents: a Knowledge Base Manager, a Natural Language Prover, and a Formal Language Prover, all operating in a closed loop to produce formally certified mathematical proofs. We evaluate MMAT on open problems in Number Theory, Algebraic Complexity Theory, Differential Algebra, Operator Algebra, and Inequalities. Across a two-month deployment, 11 problems have been solved, demonstrating its capacity to act as a co-pilot throughout the entire research cycle. The contributions are threefold: a general decoupled Harness Architecture for multi-agent mathematical reasoning, its concrete instantiation in the MMAT system, and empirical validation on a diverse suite of open problems.