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Draft, Sketch, and Prove: Guiding Formal Theorem Provers with Informal Proofs (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on Oct 25, 2022 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Turns informal math proofs into formal proof sketches that guide an automated prover toward easier sub-problems. On competition problems, this raised the share solved from 20.9% to 39.3% compared with searching without guidance.

Abstract

The formalization of existing mathematical proofs is a notoriously difficult process. Despite decades of research on automation and proof assistants, writing formal proofs remains arduous and only accessible to a few experts. While previous studies to automate formalization focused on powerful search algorithms, no attempts were made to take advantage of available informal proofs. In this work, we introduce Draft, Sketch, and Prove (DSP), a method that maps informal proofs to formal proof sketches, and uses the sketches to guide an automated prover by directing its search to easier sub-problems. We investigate two relevant setups where informal proofs are either written by humans or generated by a language model. Our experiments and ablation studies show that large language models are able to produce well-structured formal sketches that follow the same reasoning steps as the informal proofs. Guiding an automated prover with these sketches enhances its performance from 20.9% to 39.3% on a collection of mathematical competition problems.

Albert Q. Jiang, Sean Welleck, Jin Peng Zhou, Wenda Li, Jiacheng Liu, Mateja Jamnik, Timothée Lacroix, Yuhuai Wu, Guillaume Lample
arXiv:2210.12283 · cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Oct 21, 2022 · updated Feb 20, 2023
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