Cogentic: Multi-Agent Orchestration for Automated Proof Discovery

Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing promise in solving open problems in mathematics. However, their performance can be further improved through agentic workflows tailored to real-world mathematical practice. To this end, we introduce ProofCouncil, a mathematical agent that is designed to tackle open problems using an author-critic architecture. ProofCouncil served as a submission to the second batch of FirstProof, a challenge consisting of 10 real-world mathematical problems that agents must solve autonomously. Its submissions for 6 of the 10 problems were judged by the referees to be correct up to at most minor revisions, showing the best performance among participating teams. We also evaluate ProofCouncil on 30 open problems collected from mathematical researchers. Among the 21 solutions that received human feedback, 5 were judged completely correct, 2 more were judged promising pending final verification, and a further 8 contained useful partial progress. In this short paper, we describe the development of ProofCouncil and the agent-building library used to create it, which we release as open source to the community.

Long-horizon mathematical reasoning fails less often because a model cannot produce a valid next step than because an agent fails to maintain and expose the right semantic state across many iterations. Left unmanaged, this produces research-level proofs that are locally convincing yet globally incomplete: a key lemma unproved, an assumption unchecked, a citation unsupported, or a computational claim unverified. We present Research Math Agents (RMA), an agentic framework for long-horizon proof development built around a persistent, typed research store and an orchestrator that compiles operation-specific context from that store. The Research Context Orchestrator is the central state-management layer between the persistent research store and each locally scoped proof operation: it retrieves task-relevant artifacts, compiles them into a bounded context, invokes the appropriate operation, and writes the resulting proof edits, issue updates, literature notes, plans, or evaluations back to the store. This process is designed to keep proof revisions, unresolved issues, prior attempts, literature, and evaluations available across rounds while exposing only task-relevant state to each local operation. We evaluate RMA across complementary research-level settings using independent expert evaluation, blind mathematician review, LLM-based benchmark evaluation, and Lean 4 kernel verification. RMA achieves a 42.5% solve rate on the independently evaluated SOOHAK Challenge Hard set, obtains 8 of 10 correct solutions on First Proof B1 and 8 of 10 passing solutions on B2 under human-expert evaluation, and verifies 213 of 300 sampled Research Solved targets in Formal Conjectures with the Lean 4 kernel.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly excel at mathematical reasoning, but their unreliability limits their utility in mathematics research. A mitigation is using LLMs to generate formal proofs in languages like Lean. We perform the first large-scale evaluation of this method's ability to solve open problems. Our most capable agent autonomously resolved 9 of 353 open Erdős problems at the per-problem cost of a few hundred dollars, proved 44/492 OEIS conjectures, and is being deployed in combinatorics, optimization, graph theory, algebraic geometry, and quantum optics research. A basic agent alternating LLM-based generation with Lean-based verification replicated the Erdős successes but proved costlier on the hardest problems. These findings demonstrate the power of AI-aided formal proof search and shed light on the agent designs that enable it.