Reliable verification of proofs remains a bottleneck for training and evaluating AI systems on hard mathematical reasoning. Fully formal proofs, in languages like Lean, are easy to verify because they are unambiguous and modular. Most proofs, particularly those written by AI systems, have neither property, and translating them into formal languages remains challenging in many frontier math settings. We propose Pseudo-Formalization (PF), a proof format that captures the modularity and precision of formal proofs while retaining the flexibility of natural language. A Pseudo-Formal proof is decomposed into self-contained modules, each stating its premises, conclusion, and proof in natural language. To verify the correctness of a regular natural language proof, an LLM translates it to Pseudo-Formal and then verifies each module independently, an algorithm we call Block Verification (BV). We evaluate PF+BV on two benchmarks spanning olympiad and research-level mathematics, where it pareto-dominates LLM-as-judge baselines on error-finding precision and recall. To support future work, we release our research-level proof verification benchmark ArxivMathGradingBench.
While large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance on mathematical problems with verifiable answers, many advanced problems are proof-based and require evaluating full proofs. However, training such verifiers requires diverse and trustworthy question-proof-check (QPC) examples at scale, which are scarce. To address this challenge, we develop a human-audited, LLM-assisted data pipeline that produces large-scale QPC triplets with limited human effort. By systematically varying problem sources, generation strategies, and generator models, the pipeline creates diverse problem-proof pairs spanning multiple difficulty levels, linguistic styles, and error types. We combine multi-LLM agreement with hierarchical human auditing to obtain accurate proof-correctness labels. Using these data, we train generative proof verifiers and introduce an auxiliary fluency filter together with balanced token weighting to stabilize binary-reward long-form verification RL. Experiments show that our verifier improves proof-judgment accuracy across different proof styles and provides useful guidance for test-time selection. Overall, our results provide a practical data and training framework for natural-language proof verification.
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in mathematical reasoning, they frequently produce subtle errors that evade human detection. Formal mathematical languages like Lean 4 offer mechanical proof checking, strongly motivating the need for autoformalization: the automatic translation of natural language mathematics into verifiable code. Recent trends indicate that general-purpose LLMs, heavily optimized for standard programming, now outperform smaller models explicitly fine-tuned for Lean. Leveraging this shift, we introduce an agentic autoformalization framework powered by general coding LLMs. At the core of our system is an orchestrator that manages a multi-agent pipeline tailored for research-level mathematics. Because cutting-edge research frequently relies on concepts outside the scope of existing libraries like Mathlib, our system dynamically extends necessary type definitions and validates them via a novel Auxiliary Lemma technique before formalizing the primary theorems. We applied our approach to PutnamBench, producing machine-checked Lean proofs for a random sample of 32 problems. Furthermore, we evaluate our system on five papers from the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) spanning combinatorics, communication complexity, mechanism design, and learning theory, successfully formalizing their main theorems and validating the generated formalizations with human experts; for all five we also formalize the proofs alongside the statements, and notably two of them are proved with no axioms beyond Lean's kernel. All of our formalizations are available at https://beyondthelibrary.github.io/formal_arxiv .
Arshia Soltani Moakhar, Iman Gholami, Max Springer +2
Most of mathematical knowledge has been communicated through so-called informal use of mathematics and natural language. With large language models (LLMs) being highly adept in using natural language, they achieve strong performance, yet not perfect, in informal mathematical reasoning. Restraining LLMs to informal reasoning misses out on the opportunity to use the discrete verification abilities that machines offer through machine-checkable proofs. In this paper, we bridge the gap between informal and formal reasoning by integrating Lean signals into the informal reasoning process. We introduce Magenta, a training-free agentic pipeline that, given only a natural-language problem, produces an answer, expresses it as a Lean 4 statement, and constructs a machine-checked proof. A statement judge verifies whether the formalisation preserves the original problem, while an error-attribution judge routes failed attempts either to mathematical re-derivation or local Lean repair. Magenta achieves 100% accuracy across all evaluated olympiad benchmarks, including AIME 2025, AIME 2026, and HMMT February 2026. When paired with the open-weight K2-Horizon-7B reasoner, it solves all six IMO 2026 problems. Our analysis shows that statement adjudication is essential for preventing false certificates and that feedback-guided correction outperforms independent resampling on difficult problems.