cs.AIJul 19, 2026

Self-Modifying Lean Proof Agents with Verifier-Grounded Benchmark Coevolution

Authors: Yuqing Li, Zeguan Wu, Yu Gan, Junyu Liu

Organizations: University of Pittsburgh

Abstract

Designing effective Lean proof agents is a central challenge in formal mathematical reasoning. Beyond building stronger provers, recent work emphasizes the workflow around Lean: how an agent decomposes proof obligations, uses tools and compiler feedback, diagnoses failures, repairs proofs, and maintains structured proof context. Motivated by code-level self-evolving agents, we study whether such workflows can be evolved rather than hand-designed. We present a self-evolving Lean proof agent in which a small fixed, trusted runtime wraps a fully mutable workspace: the proof workflow, prompts, and tools. Unlike most self-evolving systems, which optimize against a fixed external benchmark, our system coevolves the agent and its benchmark. Between generations, the highest-scoring agent (the champion) revises the active task distribution through a mastery-throttled curriculum update that introduces harder proof obligations only after the current level is mastered, and a single-anchor recalibration re-runs the champion on the updated benchmark to keep scores comparable as difficulty rises. All evolution stays inside a Lean-grounded verification loop: however the agent rewrites itself, a success counts only when its behavior yields Lean-verified proofs under a trusted snapshot, and each attempt must emit a machine-readable, Lean-grounded proof context whose representation may evolve but whose groundedness is enforced. We run the coevolving trajectory and a fixed-benchmark baseline for 15 active generations and compare them on a held-out miniF2F test split. The best coevolving agent reaches a 45.1% held-out solve rate, versus 12.7% for the seed and 32.0% for the best fixed-benchmark agent, showing that verifier-grounded self-evolution can improve Lean proof workflows under a coevolving benchmark.

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