A Minimal Agent for Automated Theorem Proving

Borja Requena, Austin Letson, Krystian Nowakowski, Izan Beltran Ferreiro, Leopoldo Sarra

Track: long paper (up to 8 pages)

Keywords: formal verification, theorem proving, lean 4, agentic reasoning, agents, large language models, ai for math, math

TL;DR: An ablation study of agentic theorem provers

Abstract: 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 our baseline using qualitatively different benchmarks and compare various popular models and design choices, and demonstrate competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches, while using a significantly simpler architecture. Our results 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.

Anonymization: This submission has been anonymized for double-blind review via the removal of identifying information such as names, affiliations, and identifying URLs.

Submission Number: 16