LLM Library Learning Fails: A LEGO-Prover Case Study

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Berlot-Attwell, Ian, Rudzicz, Frank, Si, Xujie
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Berlot-Attwell, Ian
Rudzicz, Frank
Si, Xujie
author_facet Berlot-Attwell, Ian
Rudzicz, Frank
Si, Xujie
contents Recent advancements in the coding, reasoning, and tool-using abilities of LLMs have spurred interest in library learning (i.e., online learning through the creation, storage, and retrieval of reusable and composable functions, knowledge, checklists, or lemmas). Such systems often promise improved task performance through the automatic creation of broadly applicable tools, as well as superior computational performance through the caching of reasoning (i.e., the storage of generated tools). However, we find strong reason to be skeptical. We perform a deep dive into one such system, LEGO-Prover, which purports to learn reusable lemmas for mathematical reasoning. We find no evidence of the direct reuse of learned lemmas, and find evidence against the soft reuse of learned lemmas (i.e., reuse by modifying relevant examples). Crucially, we find that LEGO-Prover does not in fact improve over the simple baseline of prompting the model - the improvements in task accuracy vanish once computational cost is accounted for. Our findings suggest that serious misconceptions exist as to the effectiveness of these techniques, that a serious re-examination of the state of LLM-based library learning is required, and that we require much stronger standards for evaluation including behavioural analysis and ensuring that an equal computational budget is used for baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_03048
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLM Library Learning Fails: A LEGO-Prover Case Study
Berlot-Attwell, Ian
Rudzicz, Frank
Si, Xujie
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Recent advancements in the coding, reasoning, and tool-using abilities of LLMs have spurred interest in library learning (i.e., online learning through the creation, storage, and retrieval of reusable and composable functions, knowledge, checklists, or lemmas). Such systems often promise improved task performance through the automatic creation of broadly applicable tools, as well as superior computational performance through the caching of reasoning (i.e., the storage of generated tools). However, we find strong reason to be skeptical. We perform a deep dive into one such system, LEGO-Prover, which purports to learn reusable lemmas for mathematical reasoning. We find no evidence of the direct reuse of learned lemmas, and find evidence against the soft reuse of learned lemmas (i.e., reuse by modifying relevant examples). Crucially, we find that LEGO-Prover does not in fact improve over the simple baseline of prompting the model - the improvements in task accuracy vanish once computational cost is accounted for. Our findings suggest that serious misconceptions exist as to the effectiveness of these techniques, that a serious re-examination of the state of LLM-based library learning is required, and that we require much stronger standards for evaluation including behavioural analysis and ensuring that an equal computational budget is used for baselines.
title LLM Library Learning Fails: A LEGO-Prover Case Study
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03048