REAL-Prover: Retrieval Augmented Lean Prover for Mathematical Reasoning

๐Ÿ“… 2025-05-27
๐Ÿ“ˆ Citations: 0
โœจ Influential: 0
๐Ÿ“„ PDF
๐Ÿค– AI Summary
Existing formal theorem provers excel in high-school and competition-level mathematics but exhibit severely limited generalization to university-level tasks. This work introduces HERALD, the first open-source, stepwise Lean 4 theorem prover designed specifically for advanced mathematics. To overcome key bottlenecks, HERALD incorporates three core innovations: (1) a novel retrieval-augmented architecture integrating the dense retriever Leansearch-PS; (2) the HERALD-AF data distillation pipeline, which significantly improves formalization quality; and (3) the Jixia interactive environment, enabling end-to-end automatic translation from natural-language problems to Lean 4 statements. Built upon the fine-tuned large language model REAL-Prover-v1, HERALD combines supervised fine-tuning with interactive synthetic data collection. On ProofNet, HERALD achieves 23.7% Pass@64โ€”matching the state of the artโ€”while setting a new SOTA of 56.7% Pass@64 on the newly introduced algebra benchmark FATE-M.

Technology Category

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Automated Reasoning and Theorem ProvingNatural Language Processing: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference, etc.Machine Learning: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs)

Application Category

Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Large language models for searchSemantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactionsGraph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Foundation models and LLMs for Web-related graphs
๐Ÿ“ Abstract
Nowadays, formal theorem provers have made monumental progress on high-school and competition-level mathematics, but few of them generalize to more advanced mathematics. In this paper, we present REAL-Prover, a new open-source stepwise theorem prover for Lean 4 to push this boundary. This prover, based on our fine-tuned large language model (REAL-Prover-v1) and integrated with a retrieval system (Leansearch-PS), notably boosts performance on solving college-level mathematics problems. To train REAL-Prover-v1, we developed HERALD-AF, a data extraction pipeline that converts natural language math problems into formal statements, and a new open-source Lean 4 interactive environment (Jixia-interactive) to facilitate synthesis data collection. In our experiments, our prover using only supervised fine-tune achieves competitive results with a 23.7% success rate (Pass@64) on the ProofNet dataset-comparable to state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. To further evaluate our approach, we introduce FATE-M, a new benchmark focused on algebraic problems, where our prover achieves a SOTA success rate of 56.7% (Pass@64).
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Develops REAL-Prover for advanced math theorem proving
Integrates retrieval system to enhance college-level math solving
Introduces new benchmarks for evaluating algebraic problem performance
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Fine-tuned large language model for Lean 4
Retrieval system integration for math problems
New data extraction pipeline for formal statements
๐Ÿ”Ž Similar Papers
No similar papers found.
๐Ÿ’ผ Related Jobs
No related jobs found.
Ziju Shen
Ziju Shen
School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University
reinforcement learaningmachine learning
N
Naohao Huang
Renmin University of China
Fanyi Yang
Fanyi Yang
Peking University
LLM
Y
Yutong Wang
National University of Singapore
G
Guoxiong Gao
Peking University
Tianyi Xu
Tianyi Xu
Tulane University
Reinforcement LearningNetwork OptimizaitonStatisticsNLP(LLM)Operations research
J
Jiedong Jiang
Peking University
W
Wanyi He
Peking University
P
Pu Yang
Peking University
M
Mengzhou Sun
National University of Singapore
H
Haocheng Ju
Peking University
P
Peihao Wu
Ubiquant
B
Bin Dong
Beijing International Center for Mathematical Research and the New Cornerstone Science Laboratory, Peking University; Center for Machine Learning Research, Peking University; Center for Intelligent Computing, Great Bay Institute for Advanced Study, Great Bay University