Choir: An Open Protocol for Distributed Multi-Agent Autoformalization
Organizations: Harvard University
Abstract
AI agents can now formalize entire textbooks and major theorems in proof assistants such as Lean, but current efforts are typically centralized: a single team runs all agents and bears the full computational cost. We introduce Choir, an open protocol for distributed formalization. Choir decomposes a project into tasks that can be completed by independent contributors, each running their own agent with their own LLM subscription, while coordinating entirely through the project's GitHub repository. To support open participation, every contribution is checked by a deterministic gate before merge. Choir supports Lean 4, Isabelle, and Rocq, and is open source and modular, allowing projects to replace individual components or extend the protocol.
Figures & tables
| Role | Runs where | Does |
|---|---|---|
| Overseer | — (human) | Owns the project. Sets the goal, the audit policy, and how far the orchestrator may act alone, and rules on new axioms. |
| Orchestrator | overseer’s machine, LLM account, and GitHub auth | Plans and decomposes the goal, authors the statements , publishes typed tasks, reviews and merges pull requests, replans in a loop. |
| Workers | contributors’ machines and accounts | Claim a task, prove it with the contributor’s own agent, submit. Hold no repository write access: a claim is a comment, a submission is a pull request from the contributor’s own fork. |
| Gate | GitHub Actions in the project repo | Deterministic audits and intake validation. |
| Party | Command | What it does |
| Orchestrator | choir orch poll | Blocks until a task or a pull request changes, then exits with a JSON summary of what changed. The loop’s clock. |
| choir orch create-task | Publishes a task issue from a plan node | |
| choir orch prs | Open pull requests, with the verification gate’s results | |
| choir orch merge close | Merges a pull request, or closes it unmerged. merge refuses unless the gate passes. | |
| choir orch comment | Posts a comment on a task issue or a pull request | |
| choir orch sync-leases | Reads the comments from workers and updates task labels |
Multi-Agent Collaboration
Multi-agent collaboration studies how autonomous agents coordinate, share information, and combine capabilities to solve tasks together.
See all 309 papers