Lyra: Orchestrating Dual Correction in Automated Theorem Proving
Paper · 2023 · Chuanyang Zheng, Haiming Wang, Enze Xie et al.
Summary
Lyra targets automated formal theorem proving in Isabelle with large language models. It builds on the Draft, Sketch, and Prove (DSP) pipeline, where an LLM turns an informal proof into a formal sketch and an automated prover fills the remaining gaps. The authors identify two weaknesses in this setup. First, LLMs hallucinate, for example by pairing a correct intermediate claim with a tactic that cannot prove it. Second, the pipeline cannot learn from prover feedback.
Lyra adds two mechanisms. Tool Correction is a rule-based repair step: when a tactic fails, Lyra tries a fixed set of standard Isabelle tools such as sledgehammer or arith instead of discarding the step. Conjecture Correction runs over several rounds, returning the previous sketch and Isabelle's error messages to the LLM so it can revise its intermediate conjectures. Unlike earlier refinement methods, it relies on instructions rather than curated example triples of generation, error, and fix.
Lyra sets a new state of the art on miniF2F and proves several IMO problems. This suggests that cheap symbolic repair combined with environment feedback can substantially strengthen LLM-based provers.
Key points
- miniF2F results: validation improves from 48.0% to 55.3% (+7.3 points), and test improves from 45.5% to 51.2% (+5.7 points) over the previous best.
- Tool Correction works through a list of 12 fallback tactics. Among them are sledgehammer, linarith, presburger, sos, auto, arith, blast, simp, and auto with field_simps, each invoked via "by". It is triggered when a failing step starts with "by" or calls sledgehammer.
- Conjecture Correction is iterative. The appendix shows IMO 1959 p1 being solved across several rounds, starting from an informal proof written by GPT-4.
- The paper is inconsistent about the IMO count. The abstract mentions 3 solved IMO problems, while the contributions list IMO 1974 p5 and IMO 1981 p6 as newly solved. IMO 1981 p6 was proved using a human informal proof plus Tool Correction alone.
- The prover is Isabelle (with sledgehammer). Code is released at github.com/chuanyang-Zheng/Lyra-theorem-prover.
Institutions
Fields, topics and concepts
📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 19,503 worksArtificial Intelligence · 18,805 worksComputational Theory and Mathematics · 496 works
🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Reasoning · 1,948 works
Cite
Cite as Chuanyang Zheng, Haiming Wang, Enze Xie, Zhengying Liu, Jiankai Sun, Huajian Xin, Jianhao Shen, Zhenguo Li and Yu Li. 2023. Lyra: Orchestrating Dual Correction in Automated Theorem Proving. arXiv:2309.15806.
@misc{zheng2023lyra,
title = {{Lyra: Orchestrating Dual Correction in Automated Theorem Proving}},
author = {Chuanyang Zheng, Haiming Wang, Enze Xie, Zhengying Liu, Jiankai Sun, Huajian Xin, Jianhao Shen, Zhenguo Li and Yu Li},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2309.15806},
eprint = {2309.15806},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2309.15806}
}References
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