Towards Solving More Challenging IMO Problems via Decoupled Reasoning and Proving

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Liang, Zhenwen, Song, Linfeng, Li, Yang, Yang, Tao, Zhang, Feng, Mi, Haitao, Yu, Dong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Liang, Zhenwen
Song, Linfeng
Li, Yang
Yang, Tao
Zhang, Feng
Mi, Haitao
Yu, Dong
author_facet Liang, Zhenwen
Song, Linfeng
Li, Yang
Yang, Tao
Zhang, Feng
Mi, Haitao
Yu, Dong
contents Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) in formal languages is a foundational challenge for AI. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven remarkable progress, a significant gap remains between their powerful informal reasoning capabilities and their weak formal proving performance. Recent studies show that the informal accuracy exceeds 80% while formal success remains below 8% on benchmarks like PutnamBench. We argue this gap persists because current state-of-the-art provers, by tightly coupling reasoning and proving, are trained with paradigms that inadvertently punish deep reasoning in favor of shallow, tactic-based strategies. To bridge this fundamental gap, we propose a novel framework that decouples high-level reasoning from low-level proof generation. Our approach utilizes two distinct, specialized models: a powerful, general-purpose Reasoner to generate diverse, strategic subgoal lemmas, and an efficient Prover to rigorously verify them. This modular design liberates the model's full reasoning potential and bypasses the pitfalls of end-to-end training. We evaluate our method on a challenging set of post-2000 IMO problems, a problem set on which no prior open-source prover has reported success. Our decoupled framework successfully solves 5 of these problems, demonstrating a significant step towards automated reasoning on exceptionally difficult mathematical challenges. To foster future research, we release our full dataset of generated and verified lemmas for a wide range of IMO problems, available at https://tencent-imo.github.io/ .
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_06804
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Solving More Challenging IMO Problems via Decoupled Reasoning and Proving
Liang, Zhenwen
Song, Linfeng
Li, Yang
Yang, Tao
Zhang, Feng
Mi, Haitao
Yu, Dong
Logic in Computer Science
Artificial Intelligence
Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) in formal languages is a foundational challenge for AI. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven remarkable progress, a significant gap remains between their powerful informal reasoning capabilities and their weak formal proving performance. Recent studies show that the informal accuracy exceeds 80% while formal success remains below 8% on benchmarks like PutnamBench. We argue this gap persists because current state-of-the-art provers, by tightly coupling reasoning and proving, are trained with paradigms that inadvertently punish deep reasoning in favor of shallow, tactic-based strategies. To bridge this fundamental gap, we propose a novel framework that decouples high-level reasoning from low-level proof generation. Our approach utilizes two distinct, specialized models: a powerful, general-purpose Reasoner to generate diverse, strategic subgoal lemmas, and an efficient Prover to rigorously verify them. This modular design liberates the model's full reasoning potential and bypasses the pitfalls of end-to-end training. We evaluate our method on a challenging set of post-2000 IMO problems, a problem set on which no prior open-source prover has reported success. Our decoupled framework successfully solves 5 of these problems, demonstrating a significant step towards automated reasoning on exceptionally difficult mathematical challenges. To foster future research, we release our full dataset of generated and verified lemmas for a wide range of IMO problems, available at https://tencent-imo.github.io/ .
title Towards Solving More Challenging IMO Problems via Decoupled Reasoning and Proving
topic Logic in Computer Science
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06804