Risk-Controlled Lean-as-Judge for Natural-Language Mathematical Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Bourigault, Pauline, Ji, Xiaotong, Zimmer, Matthieu, Tutunov, Rasul, Ammar, Haitham Bou
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Bourigault, Pauline
Ji, Xiaotong
Zimmer, Matthieu
Tutunov, Rasul
Ammar, Haitham Bou
author_facet Bourigault, Pauline
Ji, Xiaotong
Zimmer, Matthieu
Tutunov, Rasul
Ammar, Haitham Bou
contents Lean is increasingly used to judge natural-language mathematical answers, but its signal is partial: many answers never formalize, and a failed proof may reflect an ill-typed statement or a missing library fact, not a wrong answer. On MATH-500 we show this signal is (i) sharply coverage-dependent, that is the proof-winning answer is correct 96% of the time at high proved coverage but 20% at low, and (ii) sparse and often unfaithful: a 7B autoformalizer proves a class for only 28% of problems, and a manual audit finds only approximately 43% of those proofs faithful. We propose COVCAL, a selector over Lean-trace diagnostics that certifies a finite-sample selective-risk bound on accepted answers or abstains, under two regimes (a conservative Bonferroni bound and a tighter dev-then-cal rule). Feasibility depends on autoformalization coverage: with the 7B formalizer the signal is too sparse and Bonferroni abstains on all 20 bootstrap partitions, whereas a prover-specialized formalizer reaches 79% coverage and flips it to feasible on 17 of 20, accepting approximately 48% of problems at 0.98 accepted accuracy. Since self-consistency alone is already 91% accurate, our contribution is a precise account of when, and with which formalizer, a partial formal signal can be trusted under risk control.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_28365
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Risk-Controlled Lean-as-Judge for Natural-Language Mathematical Reasoning
Bourigault, Pauline
Ji, Xiaotong
Zimmer, Matthieu
Tutunov, Rasul
Ammar, Haitham Bou
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Logic in Computer Science
Lean is increasingly used to judge natural-language mathematical answers, but its signal is partial: many answers never formalize, and a failed proof may reflect an ill-typed statement or a missing library fact, not a wrong answer. On MATH-500 we show this signal is (i) sharply coverage-dependent, that is the proof-winning answer is correct 96% of the time at high proved coverage but 20% at low, and (ii) sparse and often unfaithful: a 7B autoformalizer proves a class for only 28% of problems, and a manual audit finds only approximately 43% of those proofs faithful. We propose COVCAL, a selector over Lean-trace diagnostics that certifies a finite-sample selective-risk bound on accepted answers or abstains, under two regimes (a conservative Bonferroni bound and a tighter dev-then-cal rule). Feasibility depends on autoformalization coverage: with the 7B formalizer the signal is too sparse and Bonferroni abstains on all 20 bootstrap partitions, whereas a prover-specialized formalizer reaches 79% coverage and flips it to feasible on 17 of 20, accepting approximately 48% of problems at 0.98 accepted accuracy. Since self-consistency alone is already 91% accurate, our contribution is a precise account of when, and with which formalizer, a partial formal signal can be trusted under risk control.
title Risk-Controlled Lean-as-Judge for Natural-Language Mathematical Reasoning
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Logic in Computer Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.28365