On Multi-Step Theorem Prediction via Non-Parametric Structural Priors

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhao, Junbo, Zhang, Ting, Li, Can, He, Wei, Wang, Jingdong, Huang, Hua
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914370359918592
author Zhao, Junbo
Zhang, Ting
Li, Can
He, Wei
Wang, Jingdong
Huang, Hua
author_facet Zhao, Junbo
Zhang, Ting
Li, Can
He, Wei
Wang, Jingdong
Huang, Hua
contents Multi-step theorem prediction is a central challenge in automated reasoning. Existing neural-symbolic approaches rely heavily on supervised parametric models, which exhibit limited generalization to evolving theorem libraries. In this work, we explore training-free theorem prediction through the lens of in-context learning (ICL). We identify a critical scalability bottleneck, termed Structural Drift: as reasoning depth increases, the performance of vanilla ICL degrades sharply, often collapsing to near zero. We attribute this failure to the LLM's inability to recover latent topological dependencies, leading to unstructured exploration. To address this issue, we propose Theorem Precedence Graphs, which encode temporal dependencies from historical solution traces as directed graphs, and impose explicit topological constraints that effectively prune the search space during inference. Coupled with retrieval-augmented graph construction and a stepwise symbolic executor, our approach enables LLMs to act as structured planners without any gradient-based optimization. Experiments on the FormalGeo7k benchmark show that our method achieves 89.29% accuracy, substantially outperforming ICL baselines and matching state-of-the-art supervised models. These results indicate that explicit structural priors offer a promising direction for scaling LLM-based symbolic reasoning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_04852
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On Multi-Step Theorem Prediction via Non-Parametric Structural Priors
Zhao, Junbo
Zhang, Ting
Li, Can
He, Wei
Wang, Jingdong
Huang, Hua
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Multi-step theorem prediction is a central challenge in automated reasoning. Existing neural-symbolic approaches rely heavily on supervised parametric models, which exhibit limited generalization to evolving theorem libraries. In this work, we explore training-free theorem prediction through the lens of in-context learning (ICL). We identify a critical scalability bottleneck, termed Structural Drift: as reasoning depth increases, the performance of vanilla ICL degrades sharply, often collapsing to near zero. We attribute this failure to the LLM's inability to recover latent topological dependencies, leading to unstructured exploration. To address this issue, we propose Theorem Precedence Graphs, which encode temporal dependencies from historical solution traces as directed graphs, and impose explicit topological constraints that effectively prune the search space during inference. Coupled with retrieval-augmented graph construction and a stepwise symbolic executor, our approach enables LLMs to act as structured planners without any gradient-based optimization. Experiments on the FormalGeo7k benchmark show that our method achieves 89.29% accuracy, substantially outperforming ICL baselines and matching state-of-the-art supervised models. These results indicate that explicit structural priors offer a promising direction for scaling LLM-based symbolic reasoning.
title On Multi-Step Theorem Prediction via Non-Parametric Structural Priors
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04852