Automated Theorem Proving

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13 papers in the last four weeks, up 86% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 103

Oct 7, 2026cs.AI

From Expert-Guided Proof Search to Automated Open-Problem Solving

Large language models are increasingly contributing to mathematical research, where progress often depends on efficient proof search, incremental improvements and careful verification. We describe Bolzano, a multi-agent open-source system that uses parallel prover agents with a verifier agent and maintains a human-readable research state. Initial manual use on expert-selected problems yielded 8 results whose proofs were checked by domain experts. Motivated by these case studies, we ran Bolzano without problem-specific human guidance on about 3,800 open problems extracted from four sets of papers, solving about 200 open problems. One experiment used papers accepted to STOC 2026, a top conference in theoretical computer science. There, we answered four questions raised in the papers, as confirmed by their authors.

Adrián Zámečník, Matěj Kripner, Martin Koutecký +5

Computer Science Institute, Charles University · Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Charles University · Department of Applied Mathematics, Charles University +1

Automated Theorem Proving AI Agents for Scientific Discovery LLM Mathematical Reasoning Multi-Agent LLMs

Oct 7, 2026cs.AI

Cost-Efficient Theorem Proving via Agent Orchestration in Program Verification

Program verification establishes software correctness through machine-checkable proofs constructed in theorem provers. It's a guarantee especially valuable for code generated by large language models (LLMs), which is fluent but carries no assurance of correctness. Almost all existing provers, however, pursue pass rates alone at whatever sampling or search budget it takes, and overlook the success-vs-cost frontier; yet real software often carries hundreds of interdependent proof obligations, so what matters at scale is not whether one theorem can be proved, but how many can be proved economically. We introduce CoCo-Prover, which formalizes cost-efficient program proving as metalevel decision-making under cost, grounded on two-level proof graphs: an AND/OR proof hypergraph within each declaration is joined to a lemma-dependency graph across declarations; and at each step, it answers two questions: which open goals to select, and which actions to purchase on these goals. Selection stays symbolic as a topological pass over the proof graphs. Action choice is agent orchestration via metalevel decision-making: an agentic router treats every bounded specialist invocation as a separately priced, best-effort computation, matching heterogeneous specialist agents together with configurations, under evolved routing rules as evidence accumulates. On five program verification benchmarks in Lean 4 including function-level CLEVER, VERINA, and AlgoVeri, and repository-level NTP4VC and Vero, we show that CoCo-Prover achieves a better success-vs-cost frontier than baselines including frontier coding agents and state-of-the-art LLM-based provers: it achieves the best solve rate on every benchmark and up to 100% on two benchmarks. It also reduces cost by up to 30.9% compared to the strongest baseline with the strongest LLM in our evaluation.

Shuangjie Yao, Nikolaus Holzer, Mark Paul Santolucito +3

Columbia University · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Barnard College, Columbia University

Automated Theorem Proving Formal Verification Lean Theorem Proving LLM Agent Orchestration

Oct 7, 2026cs.AI

Let the Library Speak: Self-Advertised Method Selection for Formal Proving

LLM-based formal provers can retrieve relevant lemmas and prior proofs, but relevance alone does not say whether a mathematical method can be used on the current theorem. A method has prerequisites, a target, an intended action, and obligations that its use leaves to prove. Methods that look equally related to a theorem may therefore differ substantially in whether they offer a plausible next step. We formulate this as an applicability-aware method-selection problem and introduce self-advertisement: before candidates are ranked, a model generates a problem-specific proposal for each one, stating what part of the goal it targets, what action it would take, and what conditions that action requires. We organize 82 reusable methods from Putnam 2000-2014 as Method Contracts, which pair applicability descriptions with Mathlib anchors, a checked example or scaffold, and expected proof obligations. A single batched call elicits proposals across the library; vague or unsupported proposals are demoted, yielding a ranked shortlist accompanied by inspectable claims about each candidate's use. We analyze when similarity-based representations cannot distinguish methods with different applicability, how errors in applicability estimates affect shortlist quality, and what a checked scaffold guarantees under its stated assumptions. Against lexical, embedding, and embedding-plus-LLM reranking baselines, self-advertisement achieves 95.0% hit@5 on Putnam 2015-2025, compared with 84.2% for the strongest reranker. On IMO ProofBench, it achieves 91.7% compared with 88.3%. These results indicate improved coverage of annotated methods in the retrieved shortlists, particularly on Putnam.

Xiaopeng Yuan, Suijin Wang, Yanli Wang +5

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign · Tsinghua University · Imperial College London +1

Automated Theorem Proving LLM Mathematical Reasoning Lean Theorem Proving

Oct 4, 2026cs.LO

AIProver: Agentic Auto-Formalization of Mathematical Research via Certificate-Driven Evolving Harness

Proof auto-formalization translates natural-language (NL) theorems and proofs into a formal language (FL) such as Lean, enabling mechanical verification. Despite rapid progress, research-level proofs often depend on concepts missing from leading proof assistant libraries (e.g., Lean's Mathlib), and successful compilation does not guarantee that a translation preserves the theorem's meaning or the proof's reasoning. Furthermore, aligned NL-FL training data are scarce, and leading agents often rely on costly frontier models and manually engineered harnesses. To address the above issues, we present AIProver, an agentic framework for autonomous proof auto-formalization and proof synthesis (AFPS) that jointly post-trains a 119B open-weight language model and evolves its agentic, tool-calling harness with HarnessEvolve. Verifiers assess type correctness, proof completeness, and semantic correctness, returning rewards and diagnostic certificates that drive model fine-tuning and alternating reinforcement learning via symbolic feedback and HarnessEvolve, a certificate-driven evolutionary search over the whole harness control flow that re-tailors the harness to the updated model. For research-level training and evaluation, we introduce LoCoBench, 58.9k instances from Mathlib, CSLib, Mizar Math Library, and a bounded-arithmetic textbook, with a 771-instance validation split whose theorem-proof pairs have no public Lean formalization. Against 39 frameworks spanning AFPS agents, frontier LLMs, and coding agents, AIProver lifts pass@4 semantic correctness over its Leanstral-1.5 base from 15.7% to 36.7% and outperforms every other open-weight system and Aristotle. As a Claude Code and Codex skill, it lifts their semantic correctness from 41.9% and 34.1% to 79.8% and 62.4%, respectively. Further, it is also 24% cheaper than Numina-Lean-Agent, pushing the accuracy-cost frontier of research-level AFPS.

Prithwish Jana, Viet Bach Hoang, Logan Luna +9

Georgia Institute of Technology, USA · University of Pennsylvania, USA · Foothill College, USA +3

Mathematical Reasoning Benchmarks Automated Theorem Proving Lean Theorem Proving Autoformalization

Sep 30, 2026cs.AI

Cogentic: Multi-Agent Orchestration for Automated Proof Discovery

We present Cogentic, a multi-agent harness for automated proof discovery on open research problems. While frontier language models can generate strong mathematical ideas in a single shot, single-shot generation is often insufficient for open problems that require exploring multiple competing conjectures, overcoming subtle technical obstructions, and retaining intermediate progress over a long horizon. Cogentic addresses these challenges through an iterative prove--verify loop in which an orchestrator allocates a population of independent provers across distinct proof directions, subjects their output to adversarial verification by several specialized components, and promotes confirmed intermediate results into a persistent verified ledger that later rounds build on. The harness is designed to be able to solve research-level math and theoretical computer science problems. Using Gemini as the base model, Cogentic produced novel results on five open problems across online learning, auction theory, and mechanism design. Each result was independently verified by domain experts and is developed in full in companion papers. We list these results, and new ones as they are verified, at https://sites.google.com/view/cogentic .

Yang Cai, Vineet Gupta, Yanchen Jiang +4

Google Research · Yale University · Google DeepMind

Multi-Agent LLM Systems AI Agents for Scientific Discovery Automated Theorem Proving Multi-Agent Collaboration

Sep 30, 2026cs.AI

Growing an Agent/Prover Interface: Evolutionary Tool Design for Cost-Efficient Theorem Proving in Rocq and Lean

Recent achievements in AI-assisted mathematics require intensive interaction of agents with proof assistants to generate machine-checked proof certificates. Agents interact with proof assistants such as Rocq or Lean through an interface that controls what the agent receives from the prover and the cost of these interactions. Today, these interfaces are adapted from tools designed for humans and not optimized for agents. We propose an evolutionary method where a frontier model incrementally proposes new features and only keeps the ones that improve the overall performance of smaller models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by growing, on a curated set of mathematical problems, ROCQ-MCP-EVOLVE, a new MCP server for the Rocq prover. On the held-out test split of miniF2F-Rocq, an agent equipped with ROCQ-MCP-EVOLVE outperforms both the baseline that only exposes the Rocq compiler and an established MCP server, across four models from two families, in success rate, cost per solve, and time per solve. Although evolved for Rocq, the resulting server transfers to Lean, improving cost and time per solve on a subset of PutnamBench. We release ROCQ-MCP-EVOLVE and its port to Lean.

Jules Viennot, Guillaume Baudart, Marc Lelarge

IRIF, Universit´e Paris Cit´e, Inria, CNRS · DI ENS, PSL University, Inria

Automated Theorem Proving Evolutionary Optimization Interactive Theorem Proving Tool-Using Agents Lean Theorem Proving

Sep 30, 2026cs.AI

Fyan: A Human--AI Harness with Semantic Auditing for Document-Level Formalization

We present FYAN, a human--AI harness for document-level mathematical formalization. Rather than treating theorems in isolation, FYAN coordinates an end-to-end workflow spanning specification, proof planning, logical review, Lean proof construction, knowledge curation, and validation, with support for independent supervision and human guidance. A central component is evidence-grounded semantic auditing, which assesses whether formal statements faithfully preserve their informal specifications. A language model constructs structured evidence over local correspondences, omissions, scope, and logical relations, while a deterministic validator checks this evidence and produces reproducible judgments. When a substantive but admissible deviation is accepted, FYAN requires an explicit proof-transfer obligation connecting the formal statement back to a source-facing interpretation. With the same model (DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash) in every stage, FYAN proves 86 of 143 FormalTCS theorems under a strict Lean check, against 69 for a general agent harness, and raises the natural-language proof score from 0.501 to 0.851. On ConsistencyCheck, its semantic audit catches more inconsistent statements than a direct LLM judge, both on labels verified against the source (recall 0.777 vs. 0.636) and on the original labels (0.873 vs. 0.820), and localizes each mismatch it reports to a specific hypothesis, conclusion, or scope. FYAN also built ODENumLib, a 9,355-line Lean library for the numerical analysis of ordinary differential equation.

Wei Zhao, Yangshuo Zou, Chengxiang Ding +5

School of Mathematical Sciences, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China · University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA · Zhiyuan College, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China +4

Automated Theorem Proving Human-in-the-Loop AI Lean Theorem Proving Autoformalization

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

TCSAlgBench: Benchmarking Automated Proving for Research-Level Theoretical Computer Science

Large language models perform strongly on competition mathematics, but their research-level reasoning remains difficult to evaluate systematically. Theoretical computer science (TCS) connects algorithm design to explicit guarantees and fundamental limits, providing a setting for evaluating whether models can justify computational improvements with arguments humans can inspect. We introduce TCSAlgBench, a benchmark and reusable pipeline for natural-language proof discovery, comprising 398 theorem-level challenges from 138 STOC and COLT 2026 papers. Expert-designed rules complete paper-specific context, preserve computational assumptions and quantitative guarantees, and withhold constructions when discovering an algorithm is part of the task. For each task, prover systems receive theorem statements and access to cited prior work. The pipeline supports fresh, versioned challenge batches from newly released papers. We evaluate ten model configurations from four families under direct inference and prover-verifier discussion, and compare four agent workflows under matched model-call opportunities. All evaluations use the full benchmark. In the model comparison, GPT-5.6 Sol max achieves the highest five-run verifier-accepted coverage at 23.6% after 10-round discussion. Discussion and repeated sampling improve coverage. In the separate agent comparison using GPT-5.5 xhigh, decomposition improves coverage over discussion, and agentic planning achieves the highest five-run verifier-accepted coverage at 25.4%. TCSAlgBench provides a refreshable testbed for measuring progress in model reasoning and studying how agent workflows support research-level proof discovery.

Chutong Yang, Xiyuan Zhang, Yu Huang +7

Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin · Amazon · Department of Statistics and Data Science, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Mathematical Reasoning Benchmarks Automated Theorem Proving AI Agent Benchmarks Algorithmic Reasoning

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

ProofLoom: Proof-Obligation-Driven Theory Construction for Autoformalizing Research-Level Stochastic Optimization

Formalizing research-level stochastic optimization in Lean requires both an algorithm model and domain theory connecting foundational libraries to convergence proofs. Revising a model to restore provability can change the mathematical claim. We introduce ProofLoom, a fully automated LLM-agent system for Proof-Obligation-Driven Theory Construction. Given a published algorithm, target theorem, and source proof, ProofLoom autonomously constructs the Lean model and supporting theory. Open proof obligations drive the development of definitions, interfaces, lemmas, and proof plans. Signature contracts record evidence and obligations for model revisions; an independent Judge rejects unsupported assumptions and weakened conclusions. Planner expands the published argument into intermediate claims, and Audit checks whether the Lean proof follows it. Across tasks, SOptLib accumulates verified mathematics and construction experience: reusable results are extracted, generalized, and verified, while modeling decisions and failed proof routes are recorded. Later tasks retrieve these results and records and contribute new developments, forming a cycle of construction, accumulation, and reuse. On fifteen textbook and research-paper tasks, ProofLoom obtains mean human ratings of 6.3/7 and 6.4/7, compared with 4.9/7 and 5.0/7 for the strongest of six baselines. Across 33 developments, it produces 490,693 lines of algorithm-local Lean code with no sorry. The formalizations also expose 28 incorrect formulas, proof gaps, and algorithm-analysis mismatches in published sources across 22 developments, each with checked evidence.

Feiming Wang, Daibo Li, Kun Yuan

Nankai University · Peking University

Stochastic Optimization Automated Theorem Proving Formal Verification Lean Theorem Proving Autoformalization

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

When Does Structured Knowledge Help Neural Theorem Proving?

Does structured mathematical knowledge help LLMs prove theorems in Lean 4? If so, for which models, and does the answer vary by problem? Formal libraries such as Mathlib encode 285,000+ verified theorems with syntactic dependencies, but the semantic layer mathematicians rely on for discovery (analogies, generalizations, cross-domain bridges) remains implicit. We introduce MathAgent, which builds this layer as a knowledge graph, MathKG, and uses it to augment LLM theorem provers. MathKG connects 364 Mathlib theorems and definitions by 9,434 typed semantic edges inferred via LLM-based relation extraction anchored to verified Mathlib declarations. We run a controlled ablation across four augmentation modes (no context, knowledge-graph context, Mathlib retrieval, both) and five models: Qwen3-8B/32B, their Lean-specialized derivatives Goedel-Prover-V2-8B/32B, and Claude Sonnet 4.6, on miniF2F, plus PutnamBench and MathOlympiadBench for Sonnet. Three findings emerge. (i) Specialization dominates augmentation: Lean fine-tuning adds 33-38 percentage points of solve rate in every mode, and a specialized 8B model beats a

4\times

larger general one by 29-35 points, while no augmentation mode improves solve rate by more than 3 points. (ii) Augmentation is capability-conditioned: knowledge-graph context helps small models but hurts large ones, with the specialized model gaining more relative to its general base at every scale. (iii) Yet the augmentation modes solve different problems: an oracle selecting the best mode per problem solves 6% to 58% more than the unaugmented prover, a complementarity effect that strengthens on harder problems (32% more on PutnamBench). These results motivate adaptive strategies that select augmentation by model capability and problem. Code, data, and artifacts are available at https://github.com/sarehnabi/mathagent

Sareh Nabi, Roland Vogl, Marzieh Nabi

Stanford University

Automated Theorem Proving Knowledge Augmentation for Language Models LLM Reasoning with Graphs Lean Theorem Proving

Sep 23, 2026cs.LG

Learning to Discover Interesting Mathematics

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly able to solve advanced mathematical problems, including many that have been open for decades. This opens the door to expansion of mathematical knowledge at unprecedented scale. Yet, while LLMs may be able to conjecture and prove more and more theorems, it remains open whether this new mathematical knowledge is interesting or useful. We define intrinsic interestingness of a theorem as the ratio between the length of its proof and the length of its statement. We show that this correlates strongly with an extrinsic measure of the downstream utility of a theorem. We identify the difficulty of a proof conditioned on a set of premises as a useful primitive for computing these metrics, and train a 27B model that predicts proof difficulty more accurately than frontier general-purpose models. Optimizing for our metric creates a model capable of producing more interesting theorems, while also reducing substantial or full overlap with Mathlib from 91.9% to 30.6%, showcasing the creation of more out-of-distribution math. We show that our system can generate candidate theorems, select the most interesting among them, and iteratively build on a self-expanding mathematical library. These metrics provide a practical and quantifiable signal for ranking conjectures and guiding proof search within formal mathematical libraries. Our framework provides a path towards self-expanding, machine-verified mathematical libraries that can choose worthwhile statements without relying on human-supplied targets.

Niket Patel, Ahmad Rammal, Amaury Hayat +2

New York University · CERMICS, ENPC, Institut Polytechnique de Paris

Automated Theorem Proving Lean Theorem Proving Large Language Model-Guided Scientific Discovery

Sep 22, 2026cs.AI

Direct Optimization of Generators for Search in Automated Theorem Proving

Fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly advance Automated Theorem Proving (ATP), but are often deployed as guiding policies within tree search rather than for single-attempt generation. Recent work shows cross entropy is suboptimal for an LLM used in flat search strategies such as aggregation or filtering and that work has developed new loss functions to correct this misalignment. Extending this alignment to tree search is more challenging: proof discovery depends on exploration and recovery through off-trace states that supervised demonstrations do not reveal. We extend Compute-Aligned Training (CAT) to this setting through an abstraction of policy-guided search, deriving tractable, trace-supported losses. Alongside these search-aware losses, we introduce a search-agnostic uniform-allocation (UA) loss that accounts for the budget without specifying the specific search. Both induce scalar weights on per-tactic cross-entropy gradients. We characterize how off-trace behavior affects the search-aware weights, including conditions for vanishing approximation error at large budgets. On a Lean benchmark, both approaches achieve higher observed proof-success rates than cross-entropy across six search strategies, with strong results from a single shared UA adapter. Budget sweeps show larger gains over cross-entropy at 16 than at 256 expansions, implying CAT scales with test time compute.

Adam Ousherovitch, Ambuj Tewari

Department of Statistics University of Michigan

Inference-Time Search Automated Theorem Proving Large Language Model-Guided Optimization LLM Training

Sep 17, 2026quant-ph

Long-horizon autoformalization of a core theorem underlying MIP* = RE

Landmark mathematical formalizations have taken specialist teams years to complete. We present FormalFlow, a system that coordinates AI proving agents under human supervision to address statement drift and proof composition in long-horizon formalization. Drawing on software engineering principles and practices, it uses a shared blueprint to guide nested planning, proving and review loops. Agents strengthen verification and review throughout formalization. We completed a machine-checked Lean 4 proof of the quantum soundness of the classical low individual-degree test, a core theorem underlying MIP* = RE. Developing the proof took 63 days; greater parallelism could further reduce this time. The final library contains 126,367 lines of Lean code, all generated by agents. The formalization corrects side conditions and intermediate errors while preserving the published final error bound under corrected assumptions. This work provides a verified foundation for quantum complexity and demonstrates a route to affordable verification of major research proofs by small teams.

Sirui Lu, Ruixuan Deng, David Zhu +1

Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik, Hans-Kopfermann-Straße 1, D-85748 Garching, Germany · Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology (MCQST), Schellingstraße 4, D-80799 Munich, Germany · Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University +1

Automated Theorem Proving Formal Verification Lean Theorem Proving Autoformalization

Sep 14, 2026cs.AI

Stellar Colosseum: A Many-Agent Harness for Long-Horizon Research in Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science

Language models can produce plausible short proofs, but may still be unreliable on long-horizon research problems, where progress depends on a sequence of uncertain and interdependent decisions. We introduce Stellar Colosseum, a model-agnostic harness for allocating inference across research in mathematics and theoretical computer science. Colosseum explores alternative strategies before proof construction, uses a readiness gate to decide when a route is mature enough to decompose, represents the proof plan as interdependent section-level subproblems, and routes verifier findings back to the affected part of the argument. Across these stages, it generates candidates in parallel, attacks them with targeted falsification, and combines candidates and their critiques into a single research artifact through overlapping random-sample tree aggregation. The Colosseum workflow has been integrated into Google Antigravity's Teamwork framework as the Long Proof pattern. We demonstrate the capabilities of Colosseum through open-ended research and evaluations on theorem-proving and competitive programming benchmarks. Using Colosseum with Gemini 3.1 Pro, we obtain several new results that address open problems arising from papers published at top venues such as FOCS and JMLR. On TCS-Bench, a benchmark of research-level theorem-proving tasks drawn from papers published at FOCS, STOC, and SODA, Colosseum achieves 71.0% accuracy using Gemini 3.1 Pro and Gemini 3.7 Flash. In a separate Codeforces evaluation using Gemini 3.1 Pro, the proof-oriented pipeline with execution feedback solves 218 of 222 problems.

Honghao Lin, David P. Woodruff, Yuan Deng +3

1Google Research. · 2Carnegie Mellon University.

Inference-Time Search Automated Theorem Proving Multi-Agent Reasoning Autonomous Research Agents LLM Reasoning

Sep 14, 2026cs.LO

Gödel's and Scott's Variants of the Ontological Argument in Lean 4 and TPTP THF

The Isabelle/HOL dataset of Benzmüller and Scott's study of Gödel's ontological argument and Scott's variant (Monatshefte für Mathematik, 2025) is carried to Lean 4 and from there back to the automated provers, as a benchmark independent of either proof assistant. The port covers all thirty theories, structure and names preserved: 548 statements compare identical as parsed, every named result is proved again, and five results the original reports without replaying them are proved here. For every theorem, #print axioms gives the postulates its proof consumes: Scott's necessary existence and modal collapse need only a symmetric frame, confirming that KB suffices. The benchmark, in TPTP THF and SMT-LIB, turns the steps of an argument debated in philosophy into 294 theorems, alongside 45 statements the original refutes or leaves open, ten left open there. Five THF provers, and cvc5 on SMT-LIB, prove 227 theorems within ten seconds on one core and 232 within sixty, and none proves any of the 45. E and Leo-II solve the most, although Leo-II's calculus has been unchanged for about a decade and was only repaired and modernised here, as release 2.2. Vampire, whose later version won the higher-order division of CASC-30, solves the most in no configuration. Only E and Leo-II are measured in their own automatic mode: Zipperposition proves 101 in a single mode and 213 with its developers' portfolio, Vampire 174 without options and 209 with a higher-order schedule that its CASC mode does not select, and Leo-III 159 alone and 177 with E as partner.

Christoph Benzmüller

AI Systems Engineering, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany · Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

Automated Theorem Proving Lean Theorem Proving

Sep 12, 2026cs.AI

Magenta: Closing the Loop Between Mathematical Reasoning and Lean Verification

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.

Joshua Ong Jun Leang, Haonan Li, Zheng Zhao +6

Institute of Foundation Models · Imperial College London · University of Edinburgh +1

Automated Theorem Proving Agentic Reasoning Lean Theorem Proving Autoformalization LLM Mathematical Reasoning

Sep 3, 2026cs.AI

AutoGraphForge: Towards Automated Graph Theory Discovery

We report on our ongoing project to develop a computational pipeline, AutoGraphForge, for an automated graph-theoretic conjecturing-refuting-formalizing-proving system. Conjecture generation is counterexample-guided and runs in rounds: a Graffiti3 generator proposes conjectures over a small, evolving snapshot table

T

(initially a few hundred graphs with their computed invariants) that grows only by counterexamples to its own conjectures. A novelty filter of

559

classical and folklore relations, closed under transitive composition and linear identity substitution, decides via a linear program whether a candidate is already implied by known results. Surviving candidates are tested against a dataset of about

348,000

graphs, unioning the complete House of Graphs invariant export, the exhaustive census of all connected graphs on at most nine vertices, several extremal families (strongly regular, minimal Ramsey, Cayley, cages, barbells, lollipops, spiders), and random models. Counterexample-search algorithms then attack the remainder. Run for several rounds on an HPC cluster, the loop yields

6,522

conjectures that survived the refutation dataset, the novelty filter and every active-search run -- among them nontrivial relations between the annihilation number and the edge-cover number for bipartite and regular graphs, which we prove by hand. A subsequent formalization and proving stage deterministically translates each surviving conjecture into a Lean 4 statement skeleton; every candidate proof is kernel-verified against a pinned mathlib4 and our custom invariant preamble. This stage integrates two neural provers -- DeepSeek-Prover-V2-671B (served with vLLM) and the Lean-specialised OProver-32B -- behind the independent kernel check. It is implemented end-to-end and passes initial sanity checks, with the full pipeline currently running on the cluster.

Ján Pastorek

Department of Applied Informatics, Comenius University in Bratislava, Bratislava, Slovakia

Automated Theorem Proving Automated Algorithm Discovery

Sep 1, 2026cs.CL

A Certificate-Producing Cascade for Equational Implication: The SAIR EQT2 Stage 2 Solver

The SAIR Mathematics Distillation Challenge on Equational Theories asks a solver to classify whether one magma identity implies another and, for either verdict, to return a certificate accepted by a deterministic Lean judge. We present a single-file solver organized as a cheapest-first cascade. Its false branch combines coefficient tests over structured algebra families, bounded finite-model search, an explicit central-groupoid witness, and several infinite-carrier witnesses. Its true branch is a proof-producing ordered unit superposition procedure with Knuth-Bendix ordering, bidirectional demodulation, indexing, memoised substitution, and anytime size deepening. Search results remain outside the trusted base: successful derivations are replayed as small Lean terms, and countermodels are rechecked by the competition judge. The frozen solver is a 189,504-byte Python file with SHA-256 f2392533c9f4c03b.... In local runs through official judge revision 2848228, it produced accepted certificates for all 1,889 rows of the six public sets with no language-model calls. Separate measurements recorded full agreement on the 800 published Stage 1 evaluation-distribution problems, 100 accepted rows in the canonical Marathon manifest without tokens, and 200 accepted rows in the hosted playground. These are regression and playground measurements, not a leaderboard result and not evidence about a hidden set. All quantitative claims are tied to immutable result ledgers; the paper makes no completeness or comparative-superiority claim.

Haobo Ma, Wenlin Zhang, Manuel Israel Cázares

ChronoAI Pte. Ltd. · Singapore · National University of Singapore +2

Automated Theorem Proving Symbolic Reasoning

Aug 20, 2026cs.CL

FormalTCS: Benchmarking End-to-End Frontier Formal Theoretical Computer Science Research of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have shown growing potential for automated theoretical computer science (TCS) research, yet existing benchmarks remain far from realistic research settings. We introduce \ourbenchmark, an expert-validated benchmark for evaluating LLMs on frontier, end-to-end TCS research. \ourbenchmark contains

143

instances drawn from papers accepted to STOC, FOCS, SODA, and COLT in 2025-2026, preserving paper-specific definitions, assumptions, and proof dependencies, with expert-verified Lean formalizations and proofs. Evaluations of leading LLMs reveal that current models remain far from reliably completing the full research pipeline. In particular, autoformalization is the sharpest bottleneck: the best model achieves only

11.5

on translating natural-language claims into formal theorem statements, compared with

28.6

Pass@8 when proving human-provided formal statements. Building on \ourbenchmark, we further develop an automated TCS research framework that generates, formalizes, filters, and proves new claims. Of

64

generated claims, only

6

ultimately pass expert evaluation and proof verification, indicating that beyond formalization, limited research taste remains another major barrier to autonomous TCS research.

Dingzirui Wang, Xuanliang Zhang, Keyan Xu +2

Harbin Institute of Technology

LLM Evaluation Automated Theorem Proving Autoformalization Large Language Model-Guided Scientific Discovery

Aug 13, 2026cs.AI

PROVE-RT: Generating Mechanized Theorem Prover Scripts for Real-Time Systems using LLMs

Schedulability analysis is essential for certifying real-time systems, but existing tests are often developed through pen-and-paper proofs that are difficult to scale, validate, and maintain. Mechanized verification in PROSA/ROCQ offers a rigorous alternative, yet manually constructing such proofs requires substantial domain expertise and proof-engineering effort. Recent successes of large language models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks make them promising candidates for generating PROSA/ROCQ scripts for mechanized theorem provers. However, state-of-the-art LLMs often lack the PROSA-specific knowledge required to correctly use its modeling abstractions and proof patterns. This paper introduces PROVE-RT, an LLM-assisted framework for generating PROSA/ROCQ scripts to mechanize schedulability analyses in real-time systems literature. PROVE-RT guides generation through dependency-aware informal sketches, retrieval from processed PROSA documentation, staged skeleton generation, and proof completion. We construct a mechanization-oriented corpus from 1, 191 real-time systems papers, containing 13, 134 informal sketches with dependency information. On a curated evaluation set, direct prompting of state-of-the-art LLMs fails to reliably generate valid PROSA mechanizations, whereas PROVE-RT achieves a success rate of 44.7%. These results show that retrieval-guided and staged LLM assistance can improve automated mechanization of schedulability analysis in PROSA/ROCQ.

Sadat Shahriyar, Shareef Ahmed, Abdullah Al Arafat

Florida International University · University of South Florida

Automated Theorem Proving Real-Time Scheduling LLM-Based Program Synthesis

Aug 12, 2026cs.AI

OEIS Open: How many conjectures can language models turn into theorems?

We construct OEIS Open, a benchmark based on 492 open mathematical conjectures from the OEIS, formalized in Lean by Tsoukalas et al. Whereas these conjectures had previously been attempted only with a bespoke agent, our open-source evaluation code runs any generic language model (LM) against them, and is secure against LM cheating attempts. We find that LMs equipped with a minimal set of tools resolve 147 of these conjectures with a budget of $50 per attempt, scoring 30% on OEIS Open. OEIS Open Lite is a random subset of 100 conjectures for cheaper evaluation. When evaluated with a budget of $200 per attempt, the best current LM scores 44% on OEIS Open Lite. Giving LMs access to the mathematics literature via 476,000 papers from arXiv did not increase performance on OEIS Open Lite, and nor did using more sophisticated agent loops. The conjectures covered in this work are of uncertain mathematical significance, and most have likely received little previous attention. Nevertheless, our results show that LMs can resolve open research conjectures autonomously and at modest cost.

Tom Adamczewski

Epoch AI

LLM Evaluation Automated Theorem Proving Mathematical Reasoning

Aug 10, 2026cs.CL

TCS-BENCH: Benchmarking State-of-the-Art Generative AI Theoretical Computer Science Research Ability

We introduce TCS-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) on research-level Theoretical Computer Science (TCS) proof generation. TCS-Bench consists of theorem-proving tasks from papers published at top theoretical computer science venues (STOC, FOCS, and SODA). Each task provides the necessary context to derive a self-contained proof for a target result. We evaluate state-of-the-art models on this benchmark. We verify the correctness of generated proofs via a verification agent, and further benchmark the verifier against human-expert proof judgements on a set of target statements and generated proofs pairs. Our reference verifier achieves over 90% accuracy on the expert labeled set.

Vincent Cohen-Addad, Dimitris Paparas, Ernest van Wijland +13

†Google 1 · ‡CNRS, IRIF, Université Paris-Cité · §Princeton University, Department of Computer Science +2

LLM Evaluation Automated Theorem Proving Language Model Generation Evaluation

Aug 10, 2026cs.AI

Structure-Preserving Uncertainty Propagation in First-Order Proof Search

GK is a query-directed first-order prover that extends ordinary resolution-based proof search with explicit positive and negative claims, numerical confidence values, and prioritized default rules with exceptions. It works directly with non-ground clauses, including equality and function terms. Candidate proofs are found by bounded first-order proof search; exception conditions of defaults are checked by further bounded searches, recursively when exceptions themselves depend on defaults. This avoids requiring a finite global grounding, while allowing incomplete searches to be reported as such. This paper adds structure-preserving quantitative reporting to that framework. Retained proof histories are used in two calculations. The first reconstructs the uncertain ground premises used by each proof and computes the probability that at least one retained proof is available, without counting shared premises independently. The second resolves positive and negative support at intermediate atoms before that support is propagated through later rules; the same calculation evaluates uncertain exception conditions for individual rule applications. Reports separate positive support, negative support, conflict, and ignorance and identify detected incomplete calculations or fallbacks. The implementation performs bounded reconstruction and dependency traversal after proof search and still requires no global grounding. Analytic examples and independent simulators reproduce the reference calculations on their stated fragments. Comparisons with probabilistic logic, probabilistic ASP, default logic, and goal-directed ASP identify cases of agreement, semantic difference, unsupported translation, and incomplete computation.

Tanel Tammet

Tallinn University of Technology

Probabilistic Logic Logical Reasoning Automated Theorem Proving Uncertainty Quantification Uncertainty Propagation

Aug 5, 2026cs.LO

Can Open-Weight LLMs Produce Kernel-Verified Coq Proofs? A Pilot Study

Large language models (LLMs) can generate text that resembles a mathematical proof, but resemblance does not establish correctness. A formal proof checker verifies whether each proof step follows established logical rules. Coq bases its rules on the Calculus of Inductive Constructions, a logical framework that defines which proof steps the system may accept. This pilot study evaluated six open-weight LLMs on the same 100 theorems from CoqStoq, a benchmark derived from real Coq projects. Each LLM received one attempt per theorem with the temperature set to 0, and Coq checked every proposed proof in the theorem's original project environment. We counted a proof as successful only if the Coq kernel accepted it. Gemma 4 verified 12 of 100 theorems, Llama 3.3 verified 8, and DeepSeek Coder V2 Lite verified 1. Qwen 3.5, Mistral Small 3.1, and GPT-OSS verified none. The 21 successful model-theorem results covered 15 distinct theorems, 11 of which were not solved by a baseline of standard Coq tactics. All verified theorems had short or medium human-written reference proofs; no model verified a theorem with a long reference proof. Because the proof-length analysis was exploratory, this pattern does not establish that proof length caused the difference. For the three models with at least one success, the total generation cost per verified proof ranged from 741 to 36,193 output tokens, 14.9 to 178.0 seconds, and 0.0167 to 0.2000 aggregate GPU hours. We could not calculate these ratios for models with no verified proofs. Across 600 attempts, the models produced 21 kernel-verified proofs, giving an overall success rate of 3.5%. The study reports descriptive differences among the models but does not statistically test whether one model outperforms another. Therefore, the results do not establish a universal ranking of the six models.

Ahmed Ryan, Md Erfan, Akond Ashfaque Ur Rahman +1

University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA · Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, USA

LLM Evaluation Automated Theorem Proving Interactive Theorem Proving

Aug 3, 2026cs.AI

MechGeo: Autoformalizing and Proving Euclidean Geometry in Lean 4

We present MechGeo, a Mathlib native agentic framework that jointly addresses faithful autoformalization and certified proof construction for Euclidean geometry. In this framework, GeoFormalizer represents informal problems in GeoIR, deterministically translates them into Lean 4, and iteratively repairs candidate statements using structural diagnostics and semantic evaluation. GeoProver constructs geometric proof plans, derives intermediate lemmas, and selectively algebraizes suitable subgoals through a library verified in Lean. Singular or SymPy may generate algebraic certificates, but all resulting proofs and counterexamples are checked by Lean's kernel. Experiments across seven LLM backbones show substantial improvements in autoformalization, particularly for models with weaker direct translation performance. On 43 historical IMO geometry problems, GeoFormalizer generates formal statements that GeoProver proves in 29 cases; for the remaining 14, it constructs counterexamples verified in Lean and proves all repaired statements after expert correction. Together with IMO 2026 Problem 2, this yields, to the best of our knowledge, the largest reported collection of automated, kernel-checked Lean proofs for IMO geometry problems. On the 14 geometry statements in LEAP's Lean-IMO-Bench, MechGeo proves 12 for the first time, formally refutes the remaining two, and proves both repaired statements. These results establish counterexample guided diagnosis, geometric reasoning, and certified symbolic computation as a practical foundation for trustworthy formal geometry.

Hao Shen, Junyu Guo, Tian Cui +2

1SKLMS, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Institute of Logic and Cognition, Department of Philosophy, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangdong 510275, China +1

Automated Theorem Proving Lean Theorem Proving Autoformalization

Jul 31, 2026cs.LO

Recovering Explanations from Transformed Rule-Based Ontologies

Datalog rules are often used to define ontologies over Knowledge Graphs. Rule reasoners routinely optimise such ontologies by rewriting their rules into a form that can be evaluated more efficiently. These transformations preserve the entailed facts, but not the structure of the underlying derivations. A proof tree under the rewritten rules explains why a fact holds, but does not readily yield an explanation in terms of the original rules. We study the problem of constructing, from a proof of entailment under the rewritten rules, a proof under the original ones: we establish its computational complexity and identify two practically relevant languages for specifying proof transformations.

Alex Ivliev, Markus Krötzsch, Maximilian Marx

Knowledge-Based Systems Group, TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany

Automated Theorem Proving Symbolic Reasoning Knowledge Representation

Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

BlueprintRepair: Typed Local Edits for Failed Lean Proof Blueprints

LLM-based Lean proving systems increasingly organize a proof as a blueprint: a dependency graph of formal statements. We introduce BlueprintRepair, a repair interface that lets a model change this graph through ten schema-checked local operations. An operation names the node it edits, so the target theorem cannot be changed. Lean checks every applied change, and an accepted repair must declare every blueprint lemma its proof uses. We also construct BlueprintTrace, a benchmark of 142 controlled failures with complete accepted and rejected repair trajectories. We compare typed edits, exact source patches, and complete module rewrites under matched source, feedback, model, and budget, one episode per state and interface. With DeepSeek-V4-Flash, the three interfaces solve almost the same number of the benchmark's localized failures. Typed repair is the cheapest per solved state (patching is 1.30x as expensive, rewriting 2.06x), and within 10,000 completion tokens per task it reaches almost all of its final coverage, while both free-form interfaces are well behind. A second model, Qwen3.6-Flash, solves fewer states but keeps typed repair cheapest, puts it ahead on the proof-authoring states, and repeats the localized pattern.

Ruslan Khrulev

Lomonosov Moscow State University

Automated Theorem Proving Interactive Theorem Proving Lean Theorem Proving

Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

Albilich: Steerable Proof-State Orchestration for LLM-Based Mathematical Research with CAS Integration

Large language models can contribute useful ideas to mathematical research, yet long-horizon proof attempts remain difficult to coordinate, evaluate, and reproduce. We present Albilich, an open-source agentic harness for autoresearch in mathematics that combines long-horizon reasoning, computer algebra systems (CAS), literature retrieval, and persistent SQLite-based context management. We evaluate Albilich on the RealMath benchmark (Zhang et al. 2025) and on open problems in group theory from the Kourovka Notebook (Khukhro and Mazurov 2026). It solved 10/10 problems on RealMath with CAS and 9/10 with no CAS. On the Kourovka problems, Albilich produced a counterexample to Problem 21.142 and a proof of a strengthening of Problem20.2. Anablation on Problem 17.91 demonstrates 32.0% token reduction when CAS is enabled. An ablation on Problem 21.142 demonstrates higher verifier-rejection rate and failure to synthesize proof routes in the absence of the advisor agent. These results support Albilich as a human-steerable, CAS-boosted environment for scalable AI-assisted mathematical research.

Ting Gong, Michael Ruofan Zeng, Yong Yang

University of Washington Seattle, Washington, USA · Texas State University San Marcos, Texas, USA

Automated Theorem Proving AI-Assisted Scientific Research LLM Mathematical Reasoning Autonomous Research Agents

Jul 25, 2026cs.LG

Learned Interventions in Lean 4 grind

Lean 4's grind tactic combines congruence closure, E-matching, and case-splitting into a single automated solver, and like any such solver, it relies on hand-tuned heuristics to decide what to instantiate and where to case-split. These heuristics are tempting targets for learning, but there is a catch: because grind's search is non-monotone, a learned heuristic that helps one proof can break another, and an always-on replacement usually nets out near zero. We avoid this by invoking a learned intervention only after stock grind has already failed: a failure-triggered cascade that, by construction, cannot lose a proof grind already had. We apply it to two of grind's internal decisions. A cost-aware E-matching filter solves slightly more problems and runs about 5% faster. A lookahead step proves five theorems it otherwise times out on. We also report the negative result that motivated the design: across four feature-based models, statically predicting the correct case split is no better than random, because whether a split explodes is a runtime property that the features do not capture. Our results suggest that learning within theorem-proving tactics is most effective as a mechanism for deciding when and how to spend bounded search, backed by a reliable symbolic fallback.

Evan Wang, Simon Chess, Sophie Szeto +1

Math AI Lab, University of Washington, Seattle, United States · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, United States · Department of Mathematics, University of Washington, Seattle, United States

Automated Theorem Proving Lean Theorem Proving Inference-Time Intervention

Jul 24, 2026stat.ML

CausalSmith: A Formally Grounded, Self-Improving Agentic Framework for Automated Research in Causal Inference

Automating theoretical research requires generating candidate results and evaluating them reliably. Models keep getting better at the first, while the second remains hard. A common approach asks one large language model (LLM) to review what another produced, yet such reviewers are empirically unreliable: they may accept fabricated papers and catch the fabrication at close to chance rates~\citep{badscientist2025}. We present \textsc{CausalSmith}, a framework for automated theoretical research in causal inference built on the Lean proof assistant, where a proof is checked by a program rather than read by a referee. \textsc{CausalSmith} rests on \textsc{Causalean}, a foundational Lean library for causal inference holding 8,179 machine-checked definitions and theorems, developed with language-model assistance under human design and review. Around it, we build a self-improving agentic pipeline that selects research topics, proposes results, formalizes statements, constructs proofs, and presents the resulting artifacts for human inspection. Moreover, the pipeline pairs Lean verification with a statement audit that compares each formal theorem against the informal claim behind it. We evaluate the system using artifacts produced by completed autonomous research runs. The source code, formal library, and run records are available at https://github.com/Jiyuan-Tan/CausalSmith.

Jiyuan Tan, Vasilis Syrgkanis

AI Agents for Scientific Discovery Automated Theorem Proving Formal Verification Causal Inference Autonomous Research Agents