Formal Mathematics Statement Curriculum Learning

Stanislas Polu, Jesse Michael Han, Kunhao Zheng, Mantas Baksys, Igor Babuschkin, Ilya Sutskever

Keywords: neural theorem proving, formal mathematics, language modeling, expert iteration

Abstract: We explore the use of expert iteration in the context of language modeling applied to formal mathematics. We show that at same compute budget, expert iteration, by which we mean proof search interleaved with learning, dramatically outperforms proof search only. We also observe that when applied to a collection of formal statements of sufficiently varied difficulty, expert iteration is capable of finding and solving a curriculum of increasingly difficult problems, without the need for associated ground-truth proofs. Finally, by applying this expert iteration to a manually curated set of problem statements, we surpass previous state-of-the-art on the miniF2F benchmark, automatically solving multiple challenging problems drawn from high school olympiads.

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