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Jan 30

A Minimalist Proof Language for Neural Theorem Proving over Isabelle/HOL

Neural Theorem Proving (NTP) employs LLMs to automate formal proofs in proof assistants. While LLMs have achieved relatively remarkable success in informal reasoning tasks using natural languages, the transition to mechanized formal theorem proving presents persistent challenges. Mechanized proof languages often contain many syntactic constructs and diverse, specialized proof tactics, which facilitate expert use but have no direct counterpart in informal mathematical proofs. These prover-specific idioms represent an additional burden for LLM-based NTPs that might be otherwise successful in generating informal proofs. Seeking to bridge this gap between formal proof construction and informal reasoning, in order to better facilitate NTP, this work approaches these challenges from a language design perspective. We look at common reasoning patterns in informal proofs and in existing mechanized proofs, and design Minilang -- a minimalist proof language that captures these reasoning patterns. In contrast to proof languages (informal and formal) that often feature a large collection of operations with unclear semantic boundaries, Minilang is deliberately kept minimalist -- its core design comprises only 10 operations, each with clear semantic distinctions. We further develop a rule-based translator from Isabelle's language (Isar) to Minilang, translating ~340K existing proofs with an ~85% success rate. Using this translated corpus, we finetune two LLMs to compare machine learning performance on Minilang versus the original Isar. Experiments show Minilang benefits the two LLMs by improving the pass@1 success rate on the PISA benchmark by up to 20/29 percentage points in comparison to the Isar-based LLMs w/wo Sledgehammer. The pass@1 rate reaches 69.1%, exceeding the prior work Baldur's pass@64 (65.7%); the pass@8 rate reaches 79.2%, exceeding the SOTA on PISA (71.0%) achieved by Magnushammer.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 24, 2025

Enhancing Neural Theorem Proving through Data Augmentation and Dynamic Sampling Method

Theorem proving is a fundamental task in mathematics. With the advent of large language models (LLMs) and interactive theorem provers (ITPs) like Lean, there has been growing interest in integrating LLMs and ITPs to automate theorem proving. In this approach, the LLM generates proof steps (tactics), and the ITP checks the applicability of the tactics at the current goal. The two systems work together to complete the proof. In this paper, we introduce DS-Prover, a novel dynamic sampling method for theorem proving. This method dynamically determines the number of tactics to apply to expand the current goal, taking into account the remaining time compared to the total allocated time for proving a theorem. This makes the proof search process more efficient by adjusting the balance between exploration and exploitation as time passes. We also augment the training dataset by decomposing simplification and rewrite tactics with multiple premises into tactics with single premises. This gives the model more examples to learn from and helps it to predict the tactics with premises more accurately. We perform our experiments using the Mathlib dataset of the Lean theorem prover and report the performance on two standard datasets, MiniF2F and ProofNet. Our methods achieve significant performance gains on both datasets. We achieved a state-of-the-art performance (Pass@1) of 14.2% on the ProofNet dataset and a performance of 29.8% on MiniF2F, slightly surpassing the best-reported Pass@1 of 29.6% using Lean.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 20, 2023

EconProver: Towards More Economical Test-Time Scaling for Automated Theorem Proving

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently advanced the field of Automated Theorem Proving (ATP), attaining substantial performance gains through widely adopted test-time scaling strategies, notably reflective Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and increased sampling passes. However, they both introduce significant computational overhead for inference. Moreover, existing cost analyses typically regulate only the number of sampling passes, while neglecting the substantial disparities in sampling costs introduced by different scaling strategies. In this paper, we systematically compare the efficiency of different test-time scaling strategies for ATP models and demonstrate the inefficiency of the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) open-source approaches. We then investigate approaches to significantly reduce token usage and sample passes while maintaining the original performance. Specifically, we propose two complementary methods that can be integrated into a unified EconRL pipeline for amplified benefits: (1) a dynamic Chain-of-Thought (CoT) switching mechanism designed to mitigate unnecessary token consumption, and (2) Diverse parallel-scaled reinforcement learning (RL) with trainable prefixes to enhance pass rates under constrained sampling passes. Experiments on miniF2F and ProofNet demonstrate that our EconProver achieves comparable performance to baseline methods with only 12% of the computational cost. This work provides actionable insights for deploying lightweight ATP models without sacrificing performance.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 15, 2025 2

Adaptive Guidance Accelerates Reinforcement Learning of Reasoning Models

We study the process through which reasoning models trained with reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards (RLVR) can learn to solve new problems. We find that RLVR drives performance in two main ways: (1) by compressing pass@k into pass@1 and (2) via "capability gain" in which models learn to solve new problems that they previously could not solve even at high k. We find that while capability gain exists across model scales, learning to solve new problems is primarily driven through self-distillation. We demonstrate these findings across model scales ranging from 0.5B to 72B parameters on >500,000 reasoning problems with prompts and verifiable final answers across math, science, and code domains. We further show that we can significantly improve pass@k rates by leveraging natural language guidance for the model to consider within context while still requiring the model to derive a solution chain from scratch. Based of these insights, we derive Guide -- a new class of online training algorithms. Guide adaptively incorporates hints into the model's context on problems for which all rollouts were initially incorrect and adjusts the importance sampling ratio for the "off-policy" trajectories in order to optimize the policy for contexts in which the hints are no longer present. We describe variants of Guide for GRPO and PPO and empirically show that Guide-GRPO on 7B and 32B parameter models improves generalization over its vanilla counterpart with up to 4% macro-average improvement across math benchmarks. We include careful ablations to analyze Guide's components and theoretically analyze Guide's learning efficiency.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 16, 2025

Reliable Fine-Grained Evaluation of Natural Language Math Proofs

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) for mathematical reasoning have largely focused on tasks with easily verifiable final answers; however, generating and verifying natural language math proofs remains an open challenge. We identify the absence of a reliable, fine-grained evaluator for LLM-generated math proofs as a critical gap. To address this, we propose a systematic methodology for developing and validating evaluators that assign fine-grained scores on a 0-7 scale to model-generated math proofs. To enable this study, we introduce ProofBench, the first expert-annotated dataset of fine-grained proof ratings, spanning 145 problems from six major math competitions (USAMO, IMO, Putnam, etc) and 435 LLM-generated solutions from Gemini-2.5-pro, o3, and DeepSeek-R1. %with expert gradings. Using ProofBench as a testbed, we systematically explore the evaluator design space across key axes: the backbone model, input context, instructions and evaluation workflow. Our analysis delivers ProofGrader, an evaluator that combines a strong reasoning backbone LM, rich context from reference solutions and marking schemes, and a simple ensembling method; it achieves a low Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.926 against expert scores, significantly outperforming naive baselines. Finally, we demonstrate its practical utility in a best-of-n selection task: at n=16, ProofGrader achieves an average score of 4.14 (out of 7), closing 78% of the gap between a naive binary evaluator (2.48) and the human oracle (4.62), highlighting its potential to advance downstream proof generation.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 13, 2025

Curing Miracle Steps in LLM Mathematical Reasoning with Rubric Rewards

Large language models for mathematical reasoning are typically trained with outcome-based rewards, which credit only the final answer. In our experiments, we observe that this paradigm is highly susceptible to reward hacking, leading to a substantial overestimation of a model's reasoning ability. This is evidenced by a high incidence of false positives - solutions that reach the correct final answer through an unsound reasoning process. Through a systematic analysis with human verification, we establish a taxonomy of these failure modes, identifying patterns like Miracle Steps - abrupt jumps to a correct output without a valid preceding derivation. Probing experiments suggest a strong association between these Miracle Steps and memorization, where the model appears to recall the answer directly rather than deriving it. To mitigate this systemic issue, we introduce the Rubric Reward Model (RRM), a process-oriented reward function that evaluates the entire reasoning trajectory against problem-specific rubrics. The generative RRM provides fine-grained, calibrated rewards (0-1) that explicitly penalize logical flaws and encourage rigorous deduction. When integrated into a reinforcement learning pipeline, RRM-based training consistently outperforms outcome-only supervision across four math benchmarks. Notably, it boosts Verified Pass@1024 on AIME2024 from 26.7% to 62.6% and reduces the incidence of Miracle Steps by 71%. Our work demonstrates that rewarding the solution process is crucial for building models that are not only more accurate but also more reliable.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 9, 2025

CodeContests-O: Powering LLMs via Feedback-Driven Iterative Test Case Generation

The rise of reasoning models necessitates large-scale verifiable data, for which programming tasks serve as an ideal source. However, while competitive programming platforms provide abundant problems and solutions, high-quality test cases for verification remain scarce. Existing approaches attempt to synthesize test cases using Large Language Models (LLMs), but rely solely on the model's intrinsic generation capabilities without external feedback, frequently resulting in insufficiently diverse cases. To address this limitation, we propose a Feedback-Driven Iterative Framework for comprehensive test case construction. Specifically, our method leverages the LLM to generate initial test cases, executes them against known correct and incorrect solutions, and utilizes the failed results as feedback to guide the LLM in refining the test cases toward high fidelity and discriminability. We then apply this method to the CodeContests dataset to construct an optimized high-quality derivative, CodeContests-O. Evaluating against the entire pool of solutions (1.1 times 10^7 in total), our dataset achieves an average True Positive Rate (TPR) of 89.37% and True Negative Rate (TNR) of 90.89%, significantly outperforming the CodeContests and CodeContests+ by margins of 4.32% and 9.37%, respectively. Furthermore, fine-tuning the Qwen2.5-7B model on CodeContests-O results in a 9.52% improvement on LiveCodeBench (Pass@1). Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and the quality of CodeContests-O. To support reproducibility and facilitate future research, we release the https://github.com/cai-jianfeng/CodeContests-O{code} and https://huggingface.co/datasets/caijanfeng/CodeContests-O{dataset}.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 20

The LLM Has Left The Chat: Evidence of Bail Preferences in Large Language Models

When given the option, will LLMs choose to leave the conversation (bail)? We investigate this question by giving models the option to bail out of interactions using three different bail methods: a bail tool the model can call, a bail string the model can output, and a bail prompt that asks the model if it wants to leave. On continuations of real world data (Wildchat and ShareGPT), all three of these bail methods find models will bail around 0.28-32\% of the time (depending on the model and bail method). However, we find that bail rates can depend heavily on the model used for the transcript, which means we may be overestimating real world bail rates by up to 4x. If we also take into account false positives on bail prompt (22\%), we estimate real world bail rates range from 0.06-7\%, depending on the model and bail method. We use observations from our continuations of real world data to construct a non-exhaustive taxonomy of bail cases, and use this taxonomy to construct BailBench: a representative synthetic dataset of situations where some models bail. We test many models on this dataset, and observe some bail behavior occurring for most of them. Bail rates vary substantially between models, bail methods, and prompt wordings. Finally, we study the relationship between refusals and bails. We find: 1) 0-13\% of continuations of real world conversations resulted in a bail without a corresponding refusal 2) Jailbreaks tend to decrease refusal rates, but increase bail rates 3) Refusal abliteration increases no-refuse bail rates, but only for some bail methods 4) Refusal rate on BailBench does not appear to predict bail rate.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 4, 2025

Cheating Automatic LLM Benchmarks: Null Models Achieve High Win Rates

Automatic LLM benchmarks, such as AlpacaEval 2.0, Arena-Hard-Auto, and MT-Bench, have become popular for evaluating language models due to their cost-effectiveness and scalability compared to human evaluation. Achieving high win rates on these benchmarks can significantly boost the promotional impact of newly released language models. This promotional benefit may motivate tricks, such as manipulating model output length or style to game win rates, even though several mechanisms have been developed to control length and disentangle style to reduce gameability. Nonetheless, we show that even a "null model" that always outputs a constant response (irrelevant to input instructions) can cheat automatic benchmarks and achieve top-ranked win rates: an 86.5% LC win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0; an 83.0 score on Arena-Hard-Auto; and a 9.55 score on MT-Bench. Moreover, the crafted cheating outputs are transferable because we assume that the instructions of these benchmarks (e.g., 805 samples of AlpacaEval 2.0) are private and cannot be accessed. While our experiments are primarily proof-of-concept, an adversary could use LLMs to generate more imperceptible cheating responses, unethically benefiting from high win rates and promotional impact. Our findings call for the development of anti-cheating mechanisms for reliable automatic benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/Cheating-LLM-Benchmarks.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 9, 2024 2

CoIn: Counting the Invisible Reasoning Tokens in Commercial Opaque LLM APIs

As post-training techniques evolve, large language models (LLMs) are increasingly augmented with structured multi-step reasoning abilities, often optimized through reinforcement learning. These reasoning-enhanced models outperform standard LLMs on complex tasks and now underpin many commercial LLM APIs. However, to protect proprietary behavior and reduce verbosity, providers typically conceal the reasoning traces while returning only the final answer. This opacity introduces a critical transparency gap: users are billed for invisible reasoning tokens, which often account for the majority of the cost, yet have no means to verify their authenticity. This opens the door to token count inflation, where providers may overreport token usage or inject synthetic, low-effort tokens to inflate charges. To address this issue, we propose CoIn, a verification framework that audits both the quantity and semantic validity of hidden tokens. CoIn constructs a verifiable hash tree from token embedding fingerprints to check token counts, and uses embedding-based relevance matching to detect fabricated reasoning content. Experiments demonstrate that CoIn, when deployed as a trusted third-party auditor, can effectively detect token count inflation with a success rate reaching up to 94.7%, showing the strong ability to restore billing transparency in opaque LLM services. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/CASE-Lab-UMD/LLM-Auditing-CoIn.

  • 10 authors
·
May 19, 2025 2

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable yet Noisy Rewards under Imperfect Verifiers

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) trains policies against automated verifiers to avoid costly human labeling. To reduce vulnerability to verifier hacking, many RLVR systems collapse rewards to binary {0,1} during training. This choice carries a cost: it introduces false negatives (rejecting correct answers, FNs) and false positives (accepting incorrect ones, FPs). For instance, a rule-based checker may mark the correct fraction 12{36} as wrong when compared against the canonical 1{3} due to brittle parsing/equivalence rules (FN), while a large language model (LLM) judges can be gamed by superficial cues or even a single adversarial token, yielding inflated correctness for wrong solutions (FP). We formalize verifier unreliability by modeling the verifier as a stochastic reward channel with asymmetric noise rates. From this abstraction, we derive two correction algorithms for verifier errors. The first is a backward correction that de-biases the observed binary reward to recover an unbiased estimator of the clean policy gradient. The second is a forward correction that reweights score-function terms so that the expected update direction aligns with the clean gradient; notably, it requires only the FN rate. We implement both as lightweight hooks in a group relative policy optimization (GRPO)-based RLVR pipeline and evaluate them on math-reasoning models and benchmarks. Across models and datasets, both corrections improve over uncorrected training; the forward variant converges faster and remains stable under heavier noise. Finally, we show a practical appeal mechanism in which a lightweight LLM verifier estimates the FN rate online by rechecking rule-based negatives, obtaining outperformance compared with other state-of-the-art contenders.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 1, 2025

DeepDistill: Enhancing LLM Reasoning Capabilities via Large-Scale Difficulty-Graded Data Training

Although large language models (LLMs) have recently achieved remarkable performance on various complex reasoning benchmarks, the academic community still lacks an in-depth understanding of base model training processes and data quality. To address this, we construct a large-scale, difficulty-graded reasoning dataset containing approximately 3.34 million unique queries of varying difficulty levels and about 40 million distilled responses generated by multiple models over several passes. Leveraging pass rate and Coefficient of Variation (CV), we precisely select the most valuable training data to enhance reasoning capability. Notably, we observe a training pattern shift, indicating that reasoning-focused training based on base models requires higher learning rates for effective training. Using this carefully selected data, we significantly improve the reasoning capabilities of the base model, achieving a pass rate of 79.2\% on the AIME2024 mathematical reasoning benchmark. This result surpasses most current distilled models and closely approaches state-of-the-art performance. We provide detailed descriptions of our data processing, difficulty assessment, and training methodology, and have publicly released all datasets and methods to promote rapid progress in open-source long-reasoning LLMs. The dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/a-m-team/AM-DeepSeek-Distilled-40M

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 24, 2025

GPT Takes the Bar Exam

Nearly all jurisdictions in the United States require a professional license exam, commonly referred to as "the Bar Exam," as a precondition for law practice. To even sit for the exam, most jurisdictions require that an applicant completes at least seven years of post-secondary education, including three years at an accredited law school. In addition, most test-takers also undergo weeks to months of further, exam-specific preparation. Despite this significant investment of time and capital, approximately one in five test-takers still score under the rate required to pass the exam on their first try. In the face of a complex task that requires such depth of knowledge, what, then, should we expect of the state of the art in "AI?" In this research, we document our experimental evaluation of the performance of OpenAI's `text-davinci-003` model, often-referred to as GPT-3.5, on the multistate multiple choice (MBE) section of the exam. While we find no benefit in fine-tuning over GPT-3.5's zero-shot performance at the scale of our training data, we do find that hyperparameter optimization and prompt engineering positively impacted GPT-3.5's zero-shot performance. For best prompt and parameters, GPT-3.5 achieves a headline correct rate of 50.3% on a complete NCBE MBE practice exam, significantly in excess of the 25% baseline guessing rate, and performs at a passing rate for both Evidence and Torts. GPT-3.5's ranking of responses is also highly-correlated with correctness; its top two and top three choices are correct 71% and 88% of the time, respectively, indicating very strong non-entailment performance. While our ability to interpret these results is limited by nascent scientific understanding of LLMs and the proprietary nature of GPT, we believe that these results strongly suggest that an LLM will pass the MBE component of the Bar Exam in the near future.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 29, 2022

Probe-Rewrite-Evaluate: A Workflow for Reliable Benchmarks and Quantifying Evaluation Awareness

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit significant behavioral shifts when they perceive a change from a real-world deployment context to a controlled evaluation setting, a phenomenon known as "evaluation awareness." This discrepancy poses a critical challenge for AI alignment, as benchmark performance may not accurately reflect a model's true safety and honesty. In this work, we systematically quantify these behavioral changes by manipulating the perceived context of prompts. We introduce a methodology that uses a linear probe to score prompts on a continuous scale from "test-like" to "deploy-like" and leverage an LLM rewriting strategy to shift these prompts towards a more natural, deployment-style context while preserving the original task. Using this method, we achieved a 30% increase in the average probe score across a strategic role-playing dataset after rewriting. Evaluating a suite of state-of-the-art models on these original and rewritten prompts, we find that rewritten "deploy-like" prompts induce a significant and consistent shift in behavior. Across all models, we observed an average increase in honest responses of 5.26% and a corresponding average decrease in deceptive responses of 12.40%. Furthermore, refusal rates increased by an average of 6.38%, indicating heightened safety compliance. Our findings demonstrate that evaluation awareness is a quantifiable and manipulable factor that directly influences LLM behavior, revealing that models are more prone to unsafe or deceptive outputs in perceived test environments. This underscores the urgent need for more realistic evaluation frameworks to accurately gauge true model alignment before deployment.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 30, 2025

Rewarding Progress: Scaling Automated Process Verifiers for LLM Reasoning

A promising approach for improving reasoning in large language models is to use process reward models (PRMs). PRMs provide feedback at each step of a multi-step reasoning trace, potentially improving credit assignment over outcome reward models (ORMs) that only provide feedback at the final step. However, collecting dense, per-step human labels is not scalable, and training PRMs from automatically-labeled data has thus far led to limited gains. To improve a base policy by running search against a PRM or using it as dense rewards for reinforcement learning (RL), we ask: "How should we design process rewards?". Our key insight is that, to be effective, the process reward for a step should measure progress: a change in the likelihood of producing a correct response in the future, before and after taking the step, corresponding to the notion of step-level advantages in RL. Crucially, this progress should be measured under a prover policy distinct from the base policy. We theoretically characterize the set of good provers and our results show that optimizing process rewards from such provers improves exploration during test-time search and online RL. In fact, our characterization shows that weak prover policies can substantially improve a stronger base policy, which we also observe empirically. We validate our claims by training process advantage verifiers (PAVs) to predict progress under such provers, and show that compared to ORMs, test-time search against PAVs is >8% more accurate, and 1.5-5times more compute-efficient. Online RL with dense rewards from PAVs enables one of the first results with 5-6times gain in sample efficiency, and >6% gain in accuracy, over ORMs.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 10, 2024

HybridProver: Augmenting Theorem Proving with LLM-Driven Proof Synthesis and Refinement

Formal methods is pivotal for verifying the reliability of critical systems through rigorous mathematical proofs. However, its adoption is hindered by labor-intensive manual proofs and the expertise required to use theorem provers. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for automated theorem proving. Two promising approaches are generating tactics step by step and generating a whole proof directly with an LLM. However, existing work makes no attempt to combine the two approaches. In this work, we introduce HybridProver, a dual-model proof synthesis framework that combines tactic-based generation and whole-proof synthesis to harness the benefits of both approaches. HybridProver generates whole proof candidates for evaluation directly, then extracts proof sketches from those candidates. It then uses a tactic-based generation model that integrates automated tools to complete the sketches via stepwise refinement. We implement HybridProver for the Isabelle theorem prover and fine-tune LLMs on our optimized Isabelle datasets. Evaluation on the miniF2F dataset illustrates HybridProver's effectiveness. We achieve a 59.4% success rate on miniF2F, where the previous SOTA is 56.1%. Our ablation studies show that this SOTA result is attributable to combining whole-proof and tactic-based generation. Additionally, we show how the dataset quality, training parameters, and sampling diversity affect the final result during automated theorem proving with LLMs. All of our code, datasets, and LLMs are open source.

  • 4 authors
·
May 21, 2025

RMCBench: Benchmarking Large Language Models' Resistance to Malicious Code

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly influenced various aspects of software development activities. Despite their benefits, LLMs also pose notable risks, including the potential to generate harmful content and being abused by malicious developers to create malicious code. Several previous studies have focused on the ability of LLMs to resist the generation of harmful content that violates human ethical standards, such as biased or offensive content. However, there is no research evaluating the ability of LLMs to resist malicious code generation. To fill this gap, we propose RMCBench, the first benchmark comprising 473 prompts designed to assess the ability of LLMs to resist malicious code generation. This benchmark employs two scenarios: a text-to-code scenario, where LLMs are prompted with descriptions to generate code, and a code-to-code scenario, where LLMs translate or complete existing malicious code. Based on RMCBench, we conduct an empirical study on 11 representative LLMs to assess their ability to resist malicious code generation. Our findings indicate that current LLMs have a limited ability to resist malicious code generation with an average refusal rate of 40.36% in text-to-code scenario and 11.52% in code-to-code scenario. The average refusal rate of all LLMs in RMCBench is only 28.71%; ChatGPT-4 has a refusal rate of only 35.73%. We also analyze the factors that affect LLMs' ability to resist malicious code generation and provide implications for developers to enhance model robustness.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 23, 2024

ProofBridge: Auto-Formalization of Natural Language Proofs in Lean via Joint Embeddings

Translating human-written mathematical theorems and proofs from natural language (NL) into formal languages (FLs) like Lean 4 has long been a significant challenge for AI. Most state-of-the-art methods address this separately, first translating theorems and then generating proofs, creating a fundamental disconnect vis-a-vis true proof auto-formalization. This two-step process and its limitations were evident even in AlphaProof's silver-medal performance at the 2024 IMO, where problem statements needed manual translation before automated proof synthesis. We present ProofBridge, a unified framework for automatically translating entire NL theorems and proofs into Lean 4. At its core is a joint embedding model that aligns NL and FL (NL-FL) theorem-proof pairs in a shared semantic space, enabling cross-modal retrieval of semantically relevant FL examples to guide translation. Our training ensures that NL-FL theorems (and their proofs) are mapped close together in this space if and only if the NL-FL pairs are semantically equivalent. ProofBridge integrates retrieval-augmented fine-tuning with iterative proof repair, leveraging Lean's type checker and semantic equivalence feedback to ensure both syntactic correctness and semantic fidelity. Experiments show substantial improvements in proof auto-formalization over strong baselines (including GPT-5, Gemini-2.5, Kimina-Prover, DeepSeek-Prover), with our retrieval-augmented approach yielding significant gains in semantic correctness (SC, via proving bi-directional equivalence) and type correctness (TC, via type-checking theorem+proof) across pass@k metrics on miniF2F-Test-PF, a dataset we curated. In particular, ProofBridge improves cross-modal retrieval quality by up to 3.28x Recall@1 over all-MiniLM-L6-v2, and achieves +31.14% SC and +1.64% TC (pass@32) compared to the baseline Kimina-Prover-RL-1.7B.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 17, 2025 1

GPT as Knowledge Worker: A Zero-Shot Evaluation of (AI)CPA Capabilities

The global economy is increasingly dependent on knowledge workers to meet the needs of public and private organizations. While there is no single definition of knowledge work, organizations and industry groups still attempt to measure individuals' capability to engage in it. The most comprehensive assessment of capability readiness for professional knowledge workers is the Uniform CPA Examination developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). In this paper, we experimentally evaluate OpenAI's `text-davinci-003` and prior versions of GPT on both a sample Regulation (REG) exam and an assessment of over 200 multiple-choice questions based on the AICPA Blueprints for legal, financial, accounting, technology, and ethical tasks. First, we find that `text-davinci-003` achieves a correct rate of 14.4% on a sample REG exam section, significantly underperforming human capabilities on quantitative reasoning in zero-shot prompts. Second, `text-davinci-003` appears to be approaching human-level performance on the Remembering & Understanding and Application skill levels in the Exam absent calculation. For best prompt and parameters, the model answers 57.6% of questions correctly, significantly better than the 25% guessing rate, and its top two answers are correct 82.1% of the time, indicating strong non-entailment. Finally, we find that recent generations of GPT-3 demonstrate material improvements on this assessment, rising from 30% for `text-davinci-001` to 57% for `text-davinci-003`. These findings strongly suggest that large language models have the potential to transform the quality and efficiency of future knowledge work.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 11, 2023

DeepSeek-Prover: Advancing Theorem Proving in LLMs through Large-Scale Synthetic Data

Proof assistants like Lean have revolutionized mathematical proof verification, ensuring high accuracy and reliability. Although large language models (LLMs) show promise in mathematical reasoning, their advancement in formal theorem proving is hindered by a lack of training data. To address this issue, we introduce an approach to generate extensive Lean 4 proof data derived from high-school and undergraduate-level mathematical competition problems. This approach involves translating natural language problems into formal statements, filtering out low-quality statements, and generating proofs to create synthetic data. After fine-tuning the DeepSeekMath 7B model on this synthetic dataset, which comprises 8 million formal statements with proofs, our model achieved whole-proof generation accuracies of 46.3% with 64 samples and 52% cumulatively on the Lean 4 miniF2F test, surpassing the baseline GPT-4 at 23.0% with 64 samples and a tree search reinforcement learning method at 41.0%. Additionally, our model successfully proved 5 out of 148 problems in the Lean 4 Formalized International Mathematical Olympiad (FIMO) benchmark, while GPT-4 failed to prove any. These results demonstrate the potential of leveraging large-scale synthetic data to enhance theorem-proving capabilities in LLMs. Both the synthetic dataset and the model will be made available to facilitate further research in this promising field.

deepseek-ai DeepSeek
·
May 23, 2024 6

FactBench: A Dynamic Benchmark for In-the-Wild Language Model Factuality Evaluation

Language models (LMs) are widely used by an increasing number of users, underscoring the challenge of maintaining factuality across a broad range of topics. We first present VERIFY (Verification and Evidence RetrIeval for FactualitY evaluation), a pipeline to evaluate LMs' factuality in real-world user interactions. VERIFY considers the verifiability of LM-generated content and categorizes content units as supported, unsupported, or undecidable based on the retrieved evidence from the Web. Importantly, factuality judgment by VERIFY correlates better with human evaluations than existing methods. Using VERIFY, we identify "hallucination prompts" across diverse topics, i.e., those eliciting the highest rates of incorrect and inconclusive LM responses. These prompts form FactBench, a dataset of 1K prompts across 150 fine-grained topics. Our dataset captures emerging factuality challenges in real-world LM interactions and can be regularly updated with new prompts. We benchmark widely-used LMs from GPT, Gemini, and Llama3.1 family on FactBench, yielding the following key findings: (i) Proprietary models exhibit better factuality, with performance declining from Easy to Hard hallucination prompts. (ii) Llama3.1-405B-Instruct shows comparable or lower factual accuracy than Llama3.1-70B-Instruct across all evaluation methods due to its higher subjectivity that leads to more content labeled as undecidable. (iii) Gemini1.5-Pro shows a significantly higher refusal rate, with over-refusal in 25% of cases. Our code and data are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/launch/factbench.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 29, 2024

MUSTARD: Mastering Uniform Synthesis of Theorem and Proof Data

Recent large language models (LLMs) have witnessed significant advancement in various tasks, including mathematical reasoning and theorem proving. As these two tasks require strict and formal multi-step inference, they are appealing domains for exploring the reasoning ability of LLMs but still face important challenges. Previous studies such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) have revealed the effectiveness of intermediate steps guidance. However, such step-wise annotation requires heavy labor, leading to insufficient training steps for current benchmarks. To fill this gap, this work introduces MUSTARD, a data generation framework that masters uniform synthesis of theorem and proof data of high quality and diversity. MUSTARD synthesizes data in three stages: (1) It samples a few mathematical concept seeds as the problem category. (2) Then, it prompts a generative language model with the sampled concepts to obtain both the problems and their step-wise formal solutions. (3) Lastly, the framework utilizes a proof assistant (e.g., Lean Prover) to filter the valid proofs. With the proposed MUSTARD, we present a theorem-and-proof benchmark MUSTARDSAUCE with 5,866 valid data points. Each data point contains an informal statement, an informal proof, and a translated formal proof that passes the prover validation. We perform extensive analysis and demonstrate that MUSTARD generates validated high-quality step-by-step data. We further apply the MUSTARDSAUCE for fine-tuning smaller language models. The fine-tuned Llama 2-7B achieves a 15.41% average relative performance gain in automated theorem proving, and 8.18% in math word problems. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/Eleanor-H/MUSTARD.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 14, 2024

Best-of-Majority: Minimax-Optimal Strategy for Pass@k Inference Scaling

LLM inference often generates a batch of candidates for a prompt and selects one via strategies like majority voting or Best-of- N (BoN). For difficult tasks, this single-shot selection often underperforms. Consequently, evaluations commonly report Pass@k: the agent may submit up to k responses, and only the best of them is used when computing regret. Motivated by this, we study inference scaling in the more general Pass@k inference setting, and prove that neither majority voting nor BoN exhibits the desirable scaling with k and the sampling budget N. Combining the advantages of majority voting and BoN, we propose a new inference strategy called Best-of-Majority (BoM), with a pivotal step that restricts the candidates to the responses with high frequency in the N samples before selecting the top-k rewards. We prove that when the sampling budget is N=tildeOmega(C^*), the regret of BoM is O(epsilon_{opt}+epsilon_{mathrm{RM}^2C^*/k}), where C^* is the coverage coefficient, epsilon_{RM} is the estimation error of the reward model, and epsilon_{opt} is the estimation error of reward at the optimal response. We further establish a matching lower bound, certifying that our algorithm is minimax optimal. Beyond optimality, BoM has a key advantage: unlike majority voting and BoN, its performance does not degrade when increasing N. Experimental results of inference on math problems show BoM outperforming both majority voting and BoN.

  • 5 authors
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Oct 3, 2025

Verification Limits Code LLM Training

Large language models for code generation increasingly rely on synthetic data, where both problem solutions and verification tests are generated by models. While this enables scalable data creation, it introduces a previously unexplored bottleneck: the verification ceiling, in which the quality and diversity of training data are fundamentally constrained by the capabilities of synthetic verifiers. In this work, we systematically study how verification design and strategies influence model performance. We investigate (i) what we verify by analyzing the impact of test complexity and quantity: richer test suites improve code generation capabilities (on average +3 pass@1), while quantity alone yields diminishing returns, (ii) how we verify by exploring relaxed pass thresholds: rigid 100% pass criteria can be overly restrictive. By allowing for relaxed thresholds or incorporating LLM-based soft verification, we can recover valuable training data, leading to a 2-4 point improvement in pass@1 performance. However, this benefit is contingent upon the strength and diversity of the test cases used, and (iii) why verification remains necessary through controlled comparisons of formally correct versus incorrect solutions and human evaluation: retaining diverse correct solutions per problem yields consistent generalization gains. Our results show that Verification as currently practiced is too rigid, filtering out valuable diversity. But it cannot be discarded, only recalibrated. By combining calibrated verification with diverse, challenging problem-solution pairs, we outline a path to break the verification ceiling and unlock stronger code generation models.

  • 6 authors
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Sep 25, 2025

STP: Self-play LLM Theorem Provers with Iterative Conjecturing and Proving

A fundamental challenge in formal theorem proving by LLMs is the lack of high-quality training data. Although reinforcement learning or expert iteration partially mitigates this issue by alternating between LLM generating proofs and finetuning them on correctly generated ones, performance quickly plateaus due to the scarcity of correct proofs (sparse rewards). To keep improving the models with limited data, we draw inspiration from mathematicians, who continuously develop new results, partly by proposing novel conjectures or exercises (which are often variants of known results) and attempting to solve them. We design the Self-play Theorem Prover (STP) that simultaneously takes on two roles, conjecturer and prover, each providing training signals to the other. The conjecturer is trained iteratively on previously generated conjectures that are barely provable by the current prover, which incentivizes it to generate increasingly challenging conjectures over time. The prover attempts to prove the conjectures with standard expert iteration. We evaluate STP with both Lean and Isabelle formal versifiers. With 19.8 billion tokens generated during the training in Lean, STP proves 26.3% of the statements in the LeanWorkbook dataset, doubling the previous best result of 13.2% achieved through expert iteration. The final model achieves state-of-the-art performance among whole-proof generation methods on miniF2F-test (61.7%, pass@3200), Proofnet-test (23.1%, pass@3200) and PutnamBench (8/644, pass@3200).

  • 2 authors
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Jan 31, 2025

Towards Optimal Multi-draft Speculative Decoding

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become an indispensable part of natural language processing tasks. However, autoregressive sampling has become an efficiency bottleneck. Multi-Draft Speculative Decoding (MDSD) is a recent approach where, when generating each token, a small draft model generates multiple drafts, and the target LLM verifies them in parallel, ensuring that the final output conforms to the target model distribution. The two main design choices in MDSD are the draft sampling method and the verification algorithm. For a fixed draft sampling method, the optimal acceptance rate is a solution to an optimal transport problem, but the complexity of this problem makes it difficult to solve for the optimal acceptance rate and measure the gap between existing verification algorithms and the theoretical upper bound. This paper discusses the dual of the optimal transport problem, providing a way to efficiently compute the optimal acceptance rate. For the first time, we measure the theoretical upper bound of MDSD efficiency for vocabulary sizes in the thousands and quantify the gap between existing verification algorithms and this bound. We also compare different draft sampling methods based on their optimal acceptance rates. Our results show that the draft sampling method strongly influences the optimal acceptance rate, with sampling without replacement outperforming sampling with replacement. Additionally, existing verification algorithms do not reach the theoretical upper bound for both without replacement and with replacement sampling. Our findings suggest that carefully designed draft sampling methods can potentially improve the optimal acceptance rate and enable the development of verification algorithms that closely match the theoretical upper bound.

  • 8 authors
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Feb 25, 2025 2

Predictive Auditing of Hidden Tokens in LLM APIs via Reasoning Length Estimation

Commercial LLM services often conceal internal reasoning traces while still charging users for every generated token, including those from hidden intermediate steps, raising concerns of token inflation and potential overbilling. This gap underscores the urgent need for reliable token auditing, yet achieving it is far from straightforward: cryptographic verification (e.g., hash-based signature) offers little assurance when providers control the entire execution pipeline, while user-side prediction struggles with the inherent variance of reasoning LLMs, where token usage fluctuates across domains and prompt styles. To bridge this gap, we present PALACE (Predictive Auditing of LLM APIs via Reasoning Token Count Estimation), a user-side framework that estimates hidden reasoning token counts from prompt-answer pairs without access to internal traces. PALACE introduces a GRPO-augmented adaptation module with a lightweight domain router, enabling dynamic calibration across diverse reasoning tasks and mitigating variance in token usage patterns. Experiments on math, coding, medical, and general reasoning benchmarks show that PALACE achieves low relative error and strong prediction accuracy, supporting both fine-grained cost auditing and inflation detection. Taken together, PALACE represents an important first step toward standardized predictive auditing, offering a practical path to greater transparency, accountability, and user trust.

  • 6 authors
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Jul 29, 2025

Self-Verification is All You Need To Pass The Japanese Bar Examination

Despite rapid advances in large language models (LLMs), achieving reliable performance on highly professional and structured examinations remains a significant challenge. The Japanese bar examination is a particularly demanding benchmark, requiring not only advanced legal reasoning but also strict adherence to complex answer formats that involve joint evaluation of multiple propositions. While recent studies have reported improvements by decomposing such questions into simpler true--false judgments, these approaches have not been systematically evaluated under the original exam format and scoring scheme, leaving open the question of whether they truly capture exam-level competence. In this paper, we present a self-verification model trained on a newly constructed dataset that faithfully replicates the authentic format and evaluation scale of the exam. Our model is able to exceed the official passing score when evaluated on the actual exam scale, marking the first demonstration, to our knowledge, of an LLM passing the Japanese bar examination without altering its original question structure or scoring rules. We further conduct extensive comparisons with alternative strategies, including multi-agent inference and decomposition-based supervision, and find that these methods fail to achieve comparable performance. Our results highlight the importance of format-faithful supervision and consistency verification, and suggest that carefully designed single-model approaches can outperform more complex systems in high-stakes professional reasoning tasks. Our dataset and codes are publicly available.

  • 1 authors
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Jan 6

Web-Bench: A LLM Code Benchmark Based on Web Standards and Frameworks

The application of large language models (LLMs) in the field of coding is evolving rapidly: from code assistants, to autonomous coding agents, and then to generating complete projects through natural language. Early LLM code benchmarks primarily focused on code generation accuracy, but these benchmarks have gradually become saturated. Benchmark saturation weakens their guiding role for LLMs. For example, HumanEval Pass@1 has reached 99.4% and MBPP 94.2%. Among various attempts to address benchmark saturation, approaches based on software engineering have stood out, but the saturation of existing software engineering benchmarks is rapidly increasing. To address this, we propose a new benchmark, Web-Bench, which contains 50 projects, each consisting of 20 tasks with sequential dependencies. The tasks implement project features in sequence, simulating real-world human development workflows. When designing Web-Bench, we aim to cover the foundational elements of Web development: Web Standards and Web Frameworks. Given the scale and complexity of these projects, which were designed by engineers with 5 to 10 years of experience, each presents a significant challenge. On average, a single project takes 4 to 8 hours for a senior engineer to complete. On our given benchmark agent (Web-Agent), SOTA (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) achieves only 25.1% Pass@1, significantly lower (better) than SWE-Bench's Verified (65.4%) and Full (33.8%) scores. Finally, we discuss that in any development field, Standards and Frameworks represent foundational knowledge and efficiency tools, respectively, and LLMs require optimization tailored to them.

  • 4 authors
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May 12, 2025 1