In plain words: A neural network learns to pick which facts and lemmas a theorem prover should use, training on pairs of proof steps and the facts that actually helped, instead of hand-written rules. It beats the hand-built tool Sledgehammer, solving 59.5% of test proofs versus 38.3%.
Abstract
This paper presents a novel approach to premise selection, a crucial reasoning task in automated theorem proving. Traditionally, symbolic methods that rely on extensive domain knowledge and engineering effort are applied to this task. In contrast, this work demonstrates that contrastive training with the transformer architecture can achieve higher-quality retrieval of relevant premises, without the engineering overhead. Our method, Magnushammer, outperforms the most advanced and widely used automation tool in interactive theorem proving called Sledgehammer. On the PISA and miniF2F benchmarks Magnushammer achieves $59.5\%$ (against $38.3\%$) and $34.0\%$ (against $20.9\%$) success rates, respectively. By combining \method with a language-model-based automated theorem prover, we further improve the state-of-the-art proof success rate from $57.0\%$ to $71.0\%$ on the PISA benchmark using $4$x fewer parameters. Moreover, we develop and open source a novel dataset for premise selection, containing textual representations of (proof state, relevant premise) pairs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest available premise selection dataset, and the first one for the Isabelle proof assistant.
Maciej Mikuła, Szymon Tworkowski, Szymon Antoniak, Bartosz Piotrowski, Albert Qiaochu Jiang, Jin Peng Zhou, Christian Szegedy, Łukasz Kuciński, Piotr Miłoś, Yuhuai Wu
arXiv:2303.04488 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.LO · submitted Mar 8, 2023 · updated Mar 18, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · ICLR 2024