cs.AIJun 4, 2026

Evaluation of LLMs for Mathematical Formalization in Lean

Authors: Tyson KlingnerDrew BladekEscher CrawfordBohao ChenAriel FuKaira NairJarod AlperGiovanni Inchiostro+1 more

Organizations: Math AI Lab, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA. · Math AI Lab, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

Abstract

Within the past few years, the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate formal mathematical proofs has improved drastically. We provide a comparison of various LLMs' effectiveness in producing formal proofs in Lean 4 with the goal of assisting those seeking to use LLMs to support their own projects. We utilize both pass@kk and refine@kk metrics as the benchmark for our comparison and evaluate on subsets of both miniF2F and miniCTX datasets. Our testing shows that overall, Gemini 3.1 Pro and Claude Opus 4.7 perform best. Gemini 3.1 Pro achieved a 92% success rate on miniF2F via refine@32 whereas Opus 4.7 achieved a 86% success rate on miniCTX via refine@32. When taking cost into account, NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super and GPT-OSS 120B were the most efficient, with competitive accuracies and average costs of <\0.01$ per correct proof.

Explore similar work

Jun 2, 2026cs.AI

LEAP: Supercharging LLMs for Formal Mathematics with Agentic Frameworks

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong informal mathematical reasoning but struggle to generate mechanically verifiable proofs in formal languages like Lean. We present LEAP, an agentic framework that enables general-purpose foundation models to achieve state-of-the-art performance on automated formal theorem proving. LEAP leverages foundation model capabilities, such as informal reasoning, instruction following, and iterative self-refinement. By decomposing complex problems into smaller units, the system bridges formal proof construction with informal blueprints through continuous interaction with the Lean compiler. To provide a rigorous evaluation beyond increasingly saturated benchmarks, we introduce Lean-IMO-Bench, a benchmark of IMO-style problems formalized in Lean, with short statements yet highly non-routine and multi-step proofs across a wide range of difficulty levels. Empirically, on the latest 2025 Putnam Competition, an annual mathematics competition for undergraduate students in North America, LEAP solves all 12 problems, matching recent breakthroughs by frontier formal mathematical models. On Lean-IMO-Bench, LEAP boosts the one-shot formal solve rate of general-purpose LLMs from below 10% to 70%, notably surpassing the 48% benchmark set by a specialized, gold-medal-caliber IMO system. Furthermore, we demonstrate LEAP's research-level utility by autonomously formalizing complex proofs for open combinatorial challenges, including a verified proof for a key subproblem in Knuth's Hamiltonian decomposition of even-order Cayley graphs.
Po-Nien Kung, Linfeng Song, Dawsen Hwang +10
Jun 16, 2026cs.PL

Visored: A Controlled-Natural-Language Prover for LLM-Generated Mathematics

We present a dependent-type-based prover designed around the way LLMs (and humans) tend to write mathematics, complementing existing systems such as Lean and Rocq. Its core design choices are a surface that imitates mathematical natural language and a rule-driven automation layer that closes the routine steps a textbook would omit, so that an accepted proof can be re-emitted as a checked Lean file. Early experiments suggest that, even without any prover-specific training data, LLMs can learn to use it effectively on the miniF2F benchmark. Lean output excerpts: https://github.com/xiyuzhai-husky-lang/visored/
Xiyu Zhai, Xinyi Chen, Yiping Wang +3
Feb 27, 2026cs.AI

LemmaBench: A Live, Research-Level Benchmark to Evaluate LLM Capabilities in Mathematics

We present a new approach for benchmarking Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities on research-level mathematics. Existing benchmarks largely rely on static, hand-curated sets of contest or textbook-style problems as proxies for mathematical research. Instead, we establish an updatable benchmark evaluating models directly on the latest research results in mathematics. This consists of an automatic pipeline that extracts lemmas from arXiv and rewrites them into self-contained statements by making all assumptions and required definitions explicit. It results in a benchmark that can be updated regularly with new problems taken directly from human mathematical research, while previous instances can be used for training without compromising future evaluations. We benchmark current state-of-the-art LLMs, which obtain around 10-15%\% accuracy in theorem proving (pass@1) depending on the model, showing that there is currently a large margin of progression for LLMs to reach human-level proving capabilities in a research context.
Antoine Peyronnet, Fabian Gloeckle, Amaury Hayat