Overview

Automated theorem proving studies how to turn goals and assumptions into proofs that trusted checkers can validate, supporting dependable mathematics and software verification. Approaches range from symbolic search, resolution, tableaux, SAT/SMT solving, and tactics to language models that retrieve lemmas, decompose goals, learn from proof traces, and use Lean, Rocq, Isabelle, or Dafny feedback. Evaluation spans contest benchmarks such as miniF2F and PutnamBench, large proof libraries, code-verification tasks, and research-level problems. A central challenge is moving from benchmark success to robust, economical proofs whose formal statements faithfully capture the intended mathematics or specifications; autoformalization and semantic verification remain difficult.

Latest papers

160 papers29 papers in the last four weeks, up 142% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Apr 29, 2026

DreamProver: Evolving Transferable Lemma Libraries via a Wake-Sleep Theorem-Proving Agent

We introduce DreamProver, an agentic framework that leverages a "wake-sleep" program induction paradigm to discover reusable lemmas for formal theorem proving. Existing approaches either rely on fixed lemma libraries, which limit adaptability, or synthesize highly specific intermediate lemmas tailored to individual theorems, thereby lacking generality. DreamProver addresses this gap through an iterative two-stage process. In the wake stage, DreamProver attempts to prove theorems from a training set using the current lemma library while proposing new candidate lemmas. In the "sleep" stage, it abstracts, refines, and consolidates these candidates to compress and optimize the library. Through this alternating cycle, DreamProver progressively evolves a compact set of high-level, transferable lemmas that can be effectively used to prove unseen theorems in related domains. Experimental results demonstrate that DreamProver substantially improves proof success rates across a diverse set of mathematical benchmarks, while also producing more concise proofs and reducing computational cost.
Apr 27, 2026

QED: An Open-Source Multi-Agent System for Generating Mathematical Proofs on Open Problems

We present QED, an open-source multi-agent system that turns human-provided research questions into complete mathematical proofs without further human guidance. Its pipeline is designed to overcome common failures of single-query proof generation by separating planning, proving, and verification: a decomposition agent structures the proof search, prover agents generate candidate arguments, and verifier agents check correctness. In collaboration with domain experts, we evaluated QED on 18 research-level projects of varying difficulty. QED produced five original works across algebraic geometry, fluid PDEs, probability, and inverse problems. Expert assessments regard these works as solid specialized research contributions, with three comparable in difficulty and scope to work commonly published in established specialist mathematics venues. QED is released at https://github.com/proofQED/QED.
Apr 26, 2026

OptProver: Bridging Olympiad and Optimization through Continual Training in Formal Theorem Proving

Recent advances in formal theorem proving have focused on Olympiad-level mathematics, leaving undergraduate domains largely unexplored. Optimization, fundamental to machine learning, operations research, and scientific computing, remains underserved by existing provers. Its reliance on domain-specific formalisms (convexity, optimality conditions, and algorithmic analysis) creates significant distribution shift, making naive domain transfer ineffective. We present OptProver, a trained model that achieves robust transfer from Olympiad to undergraduate optimization. Starting from a strong Olympiad-level prover, our pipeline mitigates distribution shift through two key innovations. First, we employ large-scale optimization-focused data curation via expert iteration. Second, we introduce a specialized preference learning objective that integrates perplexity-weighted optimization with a mechanism to penalize valid but non-progressing proof steps. This not only addresses distribution shifts but also guides the search toward efficient trajectories. To enable rigorous evaluation, we construct a novel benchmark in Lean 4 focused on optimization. On this benchmark, OptProver achieves state-of-the-art Pass@1 and Pass@32 among comparably sized models while maintaining competitive performance on general theorem-proving tasks, demonstrating effective domain transfer without catastrophic forgetting.
Apr 26, 2026

Benchmarking Testing in Automated Theorem Proving

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in formal theorem proving, yet evaluating semantic correctness remains challenging. Existing evaluations rely on indirect proxies such as lexical overlap with human-annotated proof, or expensive manual inspection. Inspired by the shift from lexical comparison to test-based evaluation in code generation, we propose T , a framework that evaluates the semantic correctness of formal theorems: a generated theorem is considered correct only if all dependent successor theorems compile successfully, analogous to integration testing. We construct a benchmark from 5 real-world Lean 4 repositories, comprising 2,206 problems paired with 41 successor theorems on average, automatically extracted without human effort. Experiments demonstrate that while state-of-the-art models achieve high compilation success, they perform significantly worse under our semantic metric. The best model, Claude-Sonnet-4.5, achieves only 38.9% Testing Accuracy on the full set, given both natural language proof and successor theorems as context, revealing a critical gap in current theorem generation capabilities.
Apr 22, 2026

Scaling Self-Play with Self-Guidance

LLM self-play algorithms are notable in that, in principle, nothing bounds their learning: a Conjecturer model creates problems for a Solver, and both improve together. However, in practice, existing LLM self-play methods do not scale well with large amounts of compute, instead hitting learning plateaus. We argue this is because over long training runs, the Conjecturer learns to hack its reward, collapsing to artificially complex problems that do not help the Solver improve. To overcome this, we introduce Self-Guided Self-Play (SGS), a self-play algorithm in which the language model itself guides the Conjecturer away from degeneracy. In SGS, the model takes on three roles: Solver, Conjecturer, and a Guide that scores synthetic problems by their relevance to unsolved target problems and how clean and natural they are, providing supervision against Conjecturer collapse. Our core hypothesis is that language models can assess whether a subproblem is useful for achieving a goal. We evaluate the scaling properties of SGS by running training for significantly longer than prior works and by fitting scaling laws to cumulative solve rate curves. Applying SGS to formal theorem proving in Lean4, we find that it surpasses the asymptotic solve rate of our strongest RL baseline in fewer than 80 rounds of self-play and enables a 7B parameter model, after 200 rounds of self-play, to solve more problems than a 671B parameter model pass@4.
Apr 19, 2026

Yanasse: Finding New Proofs from Deep Vision's Analogies, Part 1

Project Yanasse presents a method for discovering new proofs of theorems in one area of mathematics by transferring proof strategy patterns (e.g., Lean 4 tactic invocation patterns) from a structurally distant area. The system extracts tactic usage distributions across 27 top-level areas of Mathlib (217,133 proof states), computes z-scores to identify tactics that are heavily used in a source area but rare or absent in a target area, matches source and target proof states via GPU-accelerated NP-hard analogy (running on a MacBook Air via Apple's MPS backend), and then asks an AI reasoning agent to semantically adapt--not symbol-substitute--the source tactics invocation pattern to the target theorem. In this first part of the study, the method is applied to the pair Probability -> Representation Theory, producing 4 Lean-verified new proofs out of 10 attempts (40%). The proofs compile with zero sorry declarations. The key finding is that tactic schemas decompose into a head (domain-gated, rarely transfers) and a modifier (domain-general, often transfers): filter upwards's head fails in representation theory (no Filter structure), but its [LIST] with ω modifier transfers cleanly as ext1 + simp [LIST] + rfl. Crucially, the underlying matching engine--deep vision lib.py--is entirely domain independent: the same optimization code for an NP-hard matching that matches chess positions by analogy matches Lean proof states by analogy, without knowing which domain it is processing. Only a relation extractor is domain-specific.
Apr 17, 2026

Learning to Reason with Insight for Informal Theorem Proving

Although most of the automated theorem-proving approaches depend on formal proof systems, informal theorem proving can align better with large language models' (LLMs) strength in natural language processing. In this work, we identify a primary bottleneck in informal theorem proving as a lack of insight, namely the difficulty of recognizing the core techniques required to solve complex problems. To address this, we propose DeepInsight\texttt{DeepInsight}, a unified training framework designed to cultivate this essential reasoning skill and enable LLMs to perform insightful reasoning. Our framework consists of three components: (1) DeepInsightTheorem\texttt{DeepInsightTheorem}, a hierarchical dataset that structures informal proofs by explicitly extracting core techniques and proof sketches alongside the final proof; (2) a Progressive Multi-Stage SFT strategy that mimics the human learning process, teaching the model proof writing, planning, and insight identification; and (3) InsightPO\texttt{InsightPO}, a policy optimization method that assigns structured rewards over this insight hierarchy. Our experiments on challenging mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that this insight-aware generation strategy significantly outperforms baselines. These results demonstrate that teaching models to identify and apply core techniques can substantially improve their mathematical reasoning.
Apr 17, 2026

Discover and Prove: An Open-source Agentic Framework for Hard Mode Automated Theorem Proving in Lean 4

Most ATP benchmarks embed the final answer within the formal statement -- a convention we call "Easy Mode" -- a design that simplifies the task relative to what human competitors face and may lead to optimistic estimates of model capability. We call the stricter, more realistic setting "Hard Mode": the system must independently discover the answer before constructing a formal proof. To enable Hard Mode research, we make two contributions. First, we release MiniF2F-Hard and FIMO-Hard, expert-reannotated Hard Mode variants of two widely-used ATP benchmarks. Second, we introduce Discover And Prove (DAP), an agentic framework that uses LLM natural-language reasoning with explicit self-reflection to discover answers, then rewrites Hard Mode statements into Easy Mode ones for existing ATP provers. DAP sets the state of the art: on CombiBench it raises solved problems from 7 (previous SOTA, Pass@16) to 10; on PutnamBench it is the first system to formally prove 36 theorems in Hard Mode -- while simultaneously revealing that state-of-the-art LLMs exceed 80% answer accuracy on the same problems where formal provers manage under 10%, exposing a substantial gap that Hard Mode benchmarks are uniquely suited to measure.
Apr 9, 2026

Awakening the Sleeping Agent: Lean-Specific Agentic Data Reactivates General Tool Use in Goedel Prover

Heavy supervised fine-tuning on a target domain can strongly suppress capabilities that were present in the base model. We study this phenomenon in formal mathematics using Goedel-Prover-V2, an open-source model heavily trained on 1.8 million formal-math examples. After domain specialization, the model almost completely loses its ability to produce valid tool calls, even when explicitly instructed to use tools, dropping from 89.4% function-calling accuracy in the base model to nearly 0%. We ask whether this agentic collapse is permanent or instead reversible. To answer this question, we fine-tune the specialized model on a small amount of Lean-specific tool-use data. Remarkably, as few as 100 agentic traces are sufficient to restore strong tool-calling behavior. Importantly, this recovery is not the result of reward hacking or benchmark-specific optimization: the recovery data is entirely drawn from the Lean setting, where the model uses natural-language queries to search the Mathlib library for relevant theorems and lemmas, yet the regained capability transfers well beyond that domain. In particular, these same 100 Lean-specific traces improve performance on the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard from near zero to 83.8%, approaching the base model's 89.4% despite the mismatch in task distribution and protocol. The recovered capability is also practically useful in-domain. On ProofNet, pass@32 improves from 21.51% to 25.81%. Together, these results show that heavy domain supervised fine-tuning can suppress general tool-use ability without permanently erasing it, and that a small amount of domain-specific agentic data can awaken dormant tool-use capabilities.
Apr 7, 2026

ProofSketcher: Hybrid LLM + Lightweight Proof Checker for Reliable Math/Logic Reasoning

The large language models (LLMs) might produce a persuasive argument within mathematical and logical fields, although such argument often includes some minor missteps, including the entire omission of side conditions, invalid inference patterns, or appeals to a lemma that cannot be derived logically out of the context being discussed. These omissions are infamously hard to notice solely out of the text, as even the misconstrued construction still may seem mostly accurate. Conversely, interactive theorem provers like Lean and Coq have rigorous reliability by ensuring that syntactic and semantic statements only accept statements that can pass all the syntactic and semantic steps in the program which is a small trusted kernel of the language type-checks with. Despite the fact that this technique provides strong guarantees, it comes at quite a heavy price: the evidence must be completely formalized, and the evidence user or a auxiliary search program must provide an avalanche of low-level information. This paper presents a hybrid pipeline where an LLM generates a typed proof sketch in a compact DSL and a lightweight trusted kernel expands the sketch into explicit proof obligations.
Apr 6, 2026

QED-Nano: Teaching a Tiny Model to Prove Hard Theorems

Proprietary AI systems have recently demonstrated impressive capabilities on complex proof-based problems, with gold-level performance reported at the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). However, the training pipelines behind these systems remain largely undisclosed, and their reliance on large "internal" models and scaffolds makes them expensive to run, difficult to reproduce, and hard to study or improve upon. This raises a central question: can small, open models also be trained to achieve competitive reasoning performance on difficult Olympiad-level math? In this paper, we answer this question by building QED-Nano, a 4B model post-trained for Olympiad-level proofs. Our training recipe has three stages: (1) supervised fine-tuning to imbue good proof-writing styles by distilling from DeepSeek-Math-V2, (2) reinforcement learning (RL) with rubric-based rewards, and (3) expanding RL with a reasoning cache, which decomposes long proofs into iterative summarize-and-refine cycles and enables stronger test-time reasoning. QED-Nano surpasses the proof-generation performance of much larger open models, including Nomos-1 and GPT-OSS-120B, and approaches the performance of proprietary models like Gemini 3 Pro, at a fraction of the inference cost. To support further research on open mathematical reasoning, we release the full QED-Nano pipeline, including the QED-Nano and QED-Nano-SFT models, the FineProofs-SFT and FineProofs-RL datasets, and the training and evaluation code.
Apr 4, 2026

Automated Conjecture Resolution with Formal Verification

Recent advances in large language models have significantly improved their ability to perform mathematical reasoning, extending from elementary problem solving to increasingly capable performance on research-level problems. However, reliably solving and verifying such problems remains challenging due to the inherent ambiguity of natural language reasoning. In this paper, we propose an automated framework that integrates natural language reasoning with formal verification to tackle research-level mathematical problems. Our framework consists of two components: an informal reasoning agent, Rethlas, and a formal verification agent, Archon. Rethlas combines reasoning primitives with our theorem search engine, Matlas, to explore solution strategies and construct candidate proofs. Archon, equipped with LeanSearch, translates informal arguments into formalized Lean 4 projects through task decomposition, iterative refinement, and automated proof synthesis, ensuring machine-checkable correctness. Using this framework, we resolve an open problem in commutative algebra and formally verify the resulting proof in Lean 4 with essentially no human involvement. Additional case studies illustrate the capabilities of Rethlas in informal mathematical reasoning and discovery, as well as the ability of Archon to formalize research-level proofs in Lean 4. Our experiments demonstrate that strong theorem retrieval tools enable the discovery and application of cross-domain mathematical techniques, while the formal agent can autonomously fill nontrivial gaps in informal arguments. More broadly, our work illustrates a promising paradigm for mathematical research in which informal and formal reasoning systems, equipped with theorem retrieval tools, operate in tandem to produce verifiable results, reduce human effort, and support human-AI collaborative mathematical research.
Mar 25, 2026

MechMath: Sorrifier-Driven Formal Decomposition Workflow for Automated Theorem Proving

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based agents have substantially improved the capabilities of automated theorem proving. However, for problems that require complex mathematical reasoning, current systems seldom succeed in their initial attempt, necessitating iterative adjustments to their proof strategies. Existing approaches for handling failed attempts typically either iteratively fix errors within the proof or discard the entire proof and regenerate it from scratch. The former leads to progressively longer contexts, which degrade the model's ability to attend to the remaining unresolved subproblems, while the latter is inefficient, as it may abandon mostly correct reasoning due to localized errors. To address this dilemma, we present MechMath, an agent system centered on a Sorrifier-driven formal decomposition paradigm. By leveraging the sorry placeholder in Lean to precisely isolate unresolved subgoals while preserving the surrounding verified proof structure, MechMath extracts each failed subproblem into a clean, self-contained context and resolves it independently. This avoids both the waste of full regeneration and the excessive context length induced by repeated repairs. Experimental results on challenging mathematical competition benchmarks, including IMO 2025, Putnam 2025, miniF2F, and a subset of ProverBench, demonstrate that our agent achieves significant advantages in proving efficiency.
Mar 22, 2026

LongCat-Flash-Prover: Advancing Native Formal Reasoning via Agentic Tool-Integrated Reinforcement Learning

We introduce LongCat-Flash-Prover, a flagship 560-billion-parameter open-source Mixture-of- Experts (MoE) model that advances Native Formal Reasoning in Lean4 through agentic tool-integrated reasoning (TIR). We decompose the native formal reasoning task into three independent formal capabilities, i.e., auto-formalization, sketching, and proving. To facilitate these capabilities, we propose a Hybrid-Experts Iteration Framework to expand high-quality task trajectories, including generating a formal statement based on a given informal problem, producing a whole-proof directly from the statement, or a lemma-style sketch. During agentic RL, we present a Hierarchical Importance Sampling Policy Optimization (HisPO) algorithm, which aims to stabilize the MoE model training on such long-horizon tasks. It employs a gradient masking strategy that accounts for the policy staleness and the inherent train-inference engine discrepancies at both sequence and token levels. Additionally, we also incorporate theorem consistency and legality detection mechanisms to eliminate reward hacking issues. Extensive evaluations show that our LongCat-Flash-Prover sets a new state-of-the-art for open-weights models in both auto-formalization and theorem proving. Demonstrating remarkable sample efficiency, it achieves a 97.1% pass rate on MiniF2F-Test using only 72 inference budget per problem. On more challenging benchmarks, it solves 70.8% of ProverBench and 41.5% of PutnamBench with no more than 220 attempts per problem, significantly outperforming existing open-weights baselines.
Mar 20, 2026

Putnam 2025 Problems in Rocq using Opus 4.6 and Rocq-MCP

We report on an experiment in which Claude Opus~4.6, equipped with a suite of Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools for the Rocq proof assistant, autonomously proved 10 of 12 problems from the 2025 Putnam Mathematical Competition. The MCP tools, designed with Claude by analyzing logs from a prior experiment on miniF2F-Rocq, encode a "compile-first, interactive-fallback" strategy. Running on an isolated VM with no internet access, the agent deployed 141 subagents over 17.7 hours of active compute (51.6h wall-clock), consuming approximately 1.9 billion tokens. All proofs are publicly available.
Mar 20, 2026

Neuro-Symbolic Proof Generation for Scaling Systems Software Verification

Formal verification via interactive theorem proving is increasingly used to ensure the correctness of critical systems, yet constructing large proof scripts remains highly manual and limits scalability. Advances in large language models (LLMs), especially in mathematical reasoning, make their integration into software verification increasingly promising. This paper introduces a neuro-symbolic proof generation framework designed to automate proof search for system-level verification projects. The framework performs a best-first tree search over proof states, repeatedly querying an LLM for the next candidate proof step. On the neural side, we fine-tune LLMs using datasets of proof state-step pairs; on the symbolic side, we incorporate a range of ITP tools to repair rejected steps, filter and rank proof states, and automatically discharge subgoals when search progress stalls. This synergy enables data-efficient LLM adaptation and semantics-informed pruning of the search space. We implement the framework on a new Isabelle REPL that exposes fine-grained proof states and automation tools, and evaluate it on the FVEL seL4 benchmark and additional Isabelle developments. On seL4, the system proves up to 77.6% of the theorems, substantially surpassing previous LLM-based approaches and standalone Sledgehammer, while solving significantly more multi-step proofs. Results across further Isabelle benchmarks demonstrate strong generalization, indicating a viable path toward scalable automated software verification.
Mar 19, 2026

Can LLMs Prove Robotic Path Planning Optimality? A Benchmark for Research-Level Algorithm Verification

Robotic path planning problems are often NP-hard, and practical solutions typically rely on approximation algorithms with provable performance guarantees for general cases. While designing such algorithms is challenging, formally proving their approximation optimality is even more demanding, which requires domain-specific geometric insights and multi-step mathematical reasoning over complex operational constraints. Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on mathematical reasoning benchmarks, yet their ability to assist with research-level optimality proofs in robotic path planning remains under-explored. In this work, we introduce the first benchmark for evaluating LLMs on approximation-ratio proofs of robotic path planning algorithms. The benchmark consists of 34 research-grade proof tasks spanning diverse planning problem types and complexity levels, each requiring structured reasoning over algorithm descriptions, problem constraints, and theoretical guarantees. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source LLMs reveals that even the strongest models struggle to produce fully valid proofs without external domain knowledge. However, providing LLMs with task-specific in-context lemmas substantially improves reasoning quality, a factor that is more effective than generic chain-of-thought prompting or supplying the ground-truth approximation ratio as posterior knowledge. We further provide fine-grained error analysis to characterize common logical failures and hallucinations, and demonstrate how each error type can be mitigated through targeted context augmentation.
Mar 18, 2026

Goedel-Code-Prover: Hierarchical Proof Search for Open State-of-the-Art Code Verification

Large language models (LLMs) can generate plausible code but offer limited guarantees of correctness. Formally verifying that implementations satisfy specifications requires constructing machine-checkable proofs, a task that remains beyond current automation. We propose a hierarchical proof search framework for automated code verification in Lean~4 that decomposes complex verification goals into structurally simpler subgoals before attempting tactic-level proving. Central to our approach is a principled decomposition score that combines constructive justification with structural effectiveness. The same score serves as both the training reward and the inference-time ranking criterion, aligning optimization and deployment. We train Goedel Code Prover, a single unified policy for both decomposition and completion, through supervised initialization followed by hybrid reinforcement learning, where a continuous decomposition reward supports planning exploration while supervised replay stabilizes proof generation. On three Lean-based code verification benchmarks comprising 427 tasks, our 8B-parameter model achieves a 62.0% prove success rate, a 2.6 improvement over the strongest baseline under the reported inference settings. We further observe consistent inference-time scaling: success rates improve monotonically with search iterations and sampling budget, while whole-proof baselines plateau within the evaluated budgets.
Mar 16, 2026

Semi-Autonomous Formalization of the Vlasov-Maxwell-Landau Equilibrium

We present a complete Lean 4 formalization of the equilibrium characterization in the Vlasov-Maxwell-Landau (VML) system, which describes the motion of charged plasma. The project demonstrates the full AI-assisted mathematical research loop: an AI reasoning model (Gemini DeepThink) generated the proof from a conjecture, an agentic coding tool (Claude Code) translated it into Lean from natural-language prompts, a specialized prover (Aristotle) closed 111 lemmas, and the Lean kernel verified the result. A single mathematician supervised the process over 10 days at a cost of $200, writing zero lines of code. The entire development process is public: all 229 human prompts, and 213 git commits are archived in the repository. We report detailed lessons on AI failure modes -- hypothesis creep, definition-alignment bugs, agent avoidance behaviors -- and on what worked: the abstract/concrete proof split, adversarial self-review, and the critical role of human review of key definitions and theorem statements. Notably, the formalization was completed before the final draft of the corresponding math paper was finished.
Mar 15, 2026

s2n-bignum-bench: A practical benchmark for evaluating low-level code reasoning of LLMs

Neurosymbolic approaches leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) with formal methods have recently achieved strong results on mathematics-oriented theorem-proving benchmarks. However, success on competition-style mathematics does not by itself demonstrate the ability to construct proofs about real-world implementations. We address this gap with a benchmark derived from an industrial cryptographic library whose assembly routines are already verified in HOL Light. s2n-bignum is a library used at AWS for providing fast assembly routines for cryptography, and its correctness is established by formal verification. The task of formally verifying this library has been a significant achievement for the Automated Reasoning Group. It involved two tasks: (1) precisely specifying the correct behavior of a program as a mathematical proposition, and (2) proving that the proposition is correct. In the case of s2n-bignum, both tasks were carried out by human experts. In s2n-bignum-bench, we provide the formal specification and ask the LLM to generate a proof script that is accepted by HOL Light within a fixed proof-check timeout. To our knowledge, s2n-bignum-bench is the first public benchmark focused on machine-checkable proof synthesis for industrial low-level cryptographic assembly routines in HOL Light. This benchmark provides a challenging and practically relevant testbed for evaluating LLM-based theorem proving beyond competition mathematics. The code to set up and use the benchmark is available here: s2n-bignum-bench.
Mar 13, 2026

Executable Archaeology: Reanimating the Logic Theorist from its IPL-V Source

The Logic Theorist (LT), created by Allen Newell, J. C. Shaw, and Herbert Simon in 1955-1956, is widely regarded as the first artificial intelligence program. While the original conceptual model was described in 1956, it underwent several iterations as the underlying Information Processing Language (IPL) evolved. Here I describe the construction of a new IPL-V interpreter, written in Common Lisp, and the faithful reanimation of the Logic Theorist from code transcribed directly from Stefferud's 1963 RAND technical report. Stefferud's version represents a pedagogical re-coding of the original heuristic logic into the standardized IPL-V. The reanimated LT successfully proves 16 of 23 attempted theorems from Chapter 2 of Principia Mathematica, results that are historically consistent with the original system's behavior within its search limits. To the author's knowledge, this is the first successful execution of the original Logic Theorist code in over half a century.
Mar 13, 2026

Delta1 with LLM: symbolic and neural integration for credible and explainable reasoning

Neuro-symbolic reasoning increasingly demands frameworks that unite the formal rigor of logic with the interpretability of large language models (LLMs). We introduce an end to end explainability by construction pipeline integrating the Automated Theorem Generator Delta1 based on the full triangular standard contradiction (FTSC) with LLMs. Delta1 deterministically constructs minimal unsatisfiable clause sets and complete theorems in polynomial time, ensuring both soundness and minimality by construction. The LLM layer verbalizes each theorem and proof trace into coherent natural language explanations and actionable insights. Empirical studies across health care, compliance, and regulatory domains show that Delta1 and LLM enables interpretable, auditable, and domain aligned reasoning. This work advances the convergence of logic, language, and learning, positioning constructive theorem generation as a principled foundation for neuro-symbolic explainable AI.
Mar 13, 2026

TaoBench: Do Automated Theorem Prover LLMs Generalize Beyond MathLib?

Automated theorem proving (ATP) benchmarks largely consist of problems formalized in MathLib, so current ATP training and evaluation are heavily biased toward MathLib's definitional framework. However, frontier mathematics is often exploratory and prototype-heavy, relying on bespoke constructions that deviate from standard libraries. In this work, we evaluate the robustness of current ATP systems when applied to a novel definitional framework, specifically examining the performance gap between standard library problems and bespoke mathematical constructions. We introduce TaoBench, an undergraduate-level benchmark derived from Terence Tao's Analysis I, which formalizes analysis by constructing core mathematical concepts from scratch, without relying on standard Mathlib definitions, as well as by mixing from-scratch and MathLib constructions. For fair evaluation, we build an agentic pipeline that automatically extracts a compilable, self-contained local environment for each problem. To isolate the effect of definitional frameworks, we additionally translate every problem into a mathematically equivalent Mathlib formulation, yielding paired TaoBench-Mathlib statements for direct comparison. While state-of-the-art ATP models perform capably within the MathLib framework, performance drops by an average of roughly 26% on the definitionally equivalent Tao formulation. This indicates that the main bottleneck is limited generalization across definitional frameworks rather than task difficulty. TaoBench thus highlights a gap between benchmark performance and applicability, and provides a concrete foundation for developing and testing provers better aligned with research mathematics.
Mar 13, 2026

Compile to Compress: Boosting Formal Theorem Provers by Compiler Outputs

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in formal theorem proving, yet state-of-the-art performance often necessitates prohibitive test-time compute via massive roll-outs or extended context windows. In this work, we address this scalability bottleneck by exploiting an informative structure in formal verification: the observation that compilers map a vast space of diverse proof attempts to a compact set of structured failure modes. We introduce a learning-to-refine framework that leverages this compression to perform efficient learning and proof exploration. We perform tree search that corrects errors locally conditioned on explicit verifier feedback, thereby circumventing the costs associated with accumulating a long history of proof attempts. Extensive evaluations show that our method consistently amplifies the reasoning capabilities of base provers across varying scales. Notably, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on PutnamBench among publicly reported ∼\sim8B and ∼\sim32B parameter models under comparable test-time budgets, offering a scalable paradigm for next-generation verifier-guided reasoning.
Mar 6, 2026

Twitch: Learning Abstractions for Equational Theorem Proving

Several successful strategies in automated reasoning rely on human-supplied guidance about which term or clause shapes are interesting. In this paper we aim to discover interesting term shapes automatically. Specifically, we discover abstractions : term patterns that occur over and over again in relevant proofs. We present our tool Twitch which discovers abstractions with the help of Stitch, a tool originally developed for discovering reusable library functions in program synthesis tasks. Twitch can produce abstractions in two ways: (1) from a partial, failed proof of a conjecture; (2) from successful proofs of other theorems in the same domain. We have also extended Twee, an equational theorem prover, to use these abstractions. We evaluate Twitch on a set of unit equality (UEQ) problems from TPTP, and show that it can prove 12 rating-1 problems as well as yielding significant speed-ups on many other problems.
Mar 5, 2026

Non-Parametric Structural Priors for Geometry Theorem Prediction

Multi-step theorem prediction is a central challenge in geometry problem solving. Existing neural-symbolic approaches rely heavily on supervised parametric models, which exhibit limited generalization to evolving theorem libraries. In this work, we explore training-free theorem prediction through the lens of in-context learning (ICL). We identify a critical scalability bottleneck, termed Structural Drift: as reasoning depth increases, the performance of vanilla ICL degrades sharply, often collapsing to near zero. We attribute this failure to the LLM's inability to recover latent topological dependencies, leading to unstructured exploration. To address this issue, we propose Theorem Precedence Graphs, which encode temporal dependencies from historical solution traces as directed graphs, and impose explicit topological constraints that effectively prune the search space during inference. Coupled with retrieval-augmented graph construction and a stepwise symbolic executor, our approach enables LLMs to act as structured planners without any gradient-based optimization. Experiments on the FormalGeo7k benchmark show that our method achieves 89.29% accuracy, substantially outperforming ICL baselines and matching state-of-the-art supervised models. These results indicate that explicit structural priors offer a promising direction for scaling LLM-based symbolic reasoning.
Mar 4, 2026

Can LLM Aid in Solving Constraints with Inductive Definitions?

Solving constraints involving inductive (aka recursive) definitions is challenging. State-of-the-art SMT/CHC solvers and first-order logic provers provide only limited support for solving such constraints, especially when they involve, e.g., abstract data types. In this work, we leverage structured prompts to elicit Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate auxiliary lemmas that are necessary for reasoning about these inductive definitions. We further propose a neuro-symbolic approach, which synergistically integrates LLMs with constraint solvers: the LLM iteratively generates conjectures, while the solver checks their validity and usefulness for proving the goal. We evaluate our approach on a diverse benchmark suite comprising constraints originating from algebrai data types and recurrence relations. The experimental results show that our approach can improve the state-of-the-art SMT and CHC solvers, solving considerably more (around 25%) proof tasks involving inductive definitions, demonstrating its efficacy.
Mar 3, 2026

SorryDB: Can AI Provers Complete Real-World Lean Theorems?

We present SorryDB, a dynamically-updating benchmark of open Lean tasks drawn from 78 real world formalization projects on GitHub. Unlike existing static benchmarks, often composed of competition problems, hillclimbing the SorryDB benchmark will yield tools that are aligned to the community needs, more usable by mathematicians, and more capable of understanding complex dependencies. Moreover, by providing a continuously updated stream of tasks, SorryDB mitigates test-set contamination and offers a robust metric for an agent's ability to contribute to novel formal mathematics projects. We evaluate a collection of approaches, including generalist large language models, agentic approaches, and specialized symbolic provers, over a selected snapshot of 1000 tasks from SorryDB. We show that current approaches are complementary: even though an agentic approach based on Gemini Flash is the most performant, it is not strictly better than other off-the-shelf large-language models, specialized provers, or even a curated list of Lean tactics.
Feb 27, 2026

A Minimal Agent for Automated Theorem Proving

We propose a minimal agentic baseline that enables systematic comparison across different AI-based theorem prover architectures. This design implements the core features shared among state-of-the-art systems: iterative proof refinement, library search and context management. We evaluate this agentic approach using qualitatively different benchmarks and compare various frontier language models and design choices. Our results show competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches, while using a significantly simpler architecture and a fraction of their cost. Additionally, we demonstrate consistent advantages of an iterative approach over multiple single-shot generations, especially in terms of sample efficiency and cost effectiveness. The implementation is released open-source as a candidate reference for future research and as an accessible prover for the community.
Feb 27, 2026

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.