Abstract:Modern Lean theorem provers achieve strong performance only with substantial training and inference compute, driven in part by scarce verified proof data and the long reasoning traces of formal proof search, making both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and sampling expensive. We introduce Pythagoras-Prover, a compute-efficient open-source family of Lean theorem provers built for practical compute budgets. The family spans two generation paradigms: autoregressive models at 4B and 32B parameters, and a first proof-of-concept diffusion-based prover (4B) that iteratively refines Lean proofs at inference time. For training efficiency, we build a Lean-verified corpus stratified into easy, medium, and hard problems for curriculum SFT, so models acquire proof skills progressively from shorter, simpler proofs to longer, harder ones. During SFT, a dynamic proof-reasoning filtering scheme preserves informative proof traces while keeping each instance within an 8k-token context budget. We also introduce Augmented Lean Formalisation (ALF), which expands scarce verified corpora into variants of formal statements, populated via self-distillation for extra training signal without formally verifying every mutated instance. By perturbing known problems while preserving their formal character, ALF reduces reliance on any statement's surface form. Empirically, Pythagoras-Prover-4B surpasses DeepSeek-Prover-V2-671B at pass@32 on MiniF2F-Test (86.1% vs 82.4%) with ~167x fewer parameters, while Pythagoras-Prover-32B sets the open-source state of the art at 93.0% on MiniF2F-Test and solves 93 of 672 PutnamBench problems. We release MiniF2F-ALF, an ALF-mutated contamination-sensitive benchmark on which every evaluated model loses accuracy; here our 32B remains strongest and our 4B matches the prior state of the art, Goedel-Prover-V2-32B.
Abstract:Theorem proving is fundamental to program verification, where the automated proof of Verification Conditions (VCs) remains a primary bottleneck. Real-world program verification frequently encounters hard VCs that existing Automated Theorem Provers (ATPs) cannot prove, leading to a critical need for extensive manual proofs that burden practical application. While Neural Theorem Proving (NTP) has achieved significant success in mathematical competitions, demonstrating the potential of machine learning approaches to formal reasoning, its application to program verification--particularly VC proving--remains largely unexplored. Despite existing work on annotation synthesis and verification-related theorem proving, no benchmark has specifically targeted this fundamental bottleneck: automated VC proving. This work introduces Neural Theorem Proving for Verification Conditions (NTP4VC), presenting the first real-world multi-language benchmark for this task. From real-world projects such as Linux and Contiki-OS kernel, our benchmark leverages industrial pipelines (Why3 and Frama-C) to generate semantically equivalent test cases across formal languages of Isabelle, Lean, and Rocq. We evaluate large language models (LLMs), both general-purpose and those fine-tuned for theorem proving, on NTP4VC. Results indicate that although LLMs show promise in VC proving, significant challenges remain for program verification, highlighting a large gap and opportunity for future research.