pith. sign in

Cobblestone: A Divide-and-Conquer Approach for Automating Formal Verification

8 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

8 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Formal verification using proof assistants, such as Coq, is an effective way of improving software quality, but requires significant effort and expertise. Machine learning can automatically synthesize proofs, but such tools are able to prove only a fraction of desired software properties. We introduce Cobblestone, a divide-and-conquer approach for proof synthesis. Cobblestone uses a large language model (LLM) to generate potential proofs, uses those proofs to break the problem into simpler parts, automatically identifies which of those parts were successfully proven, and iterates on the remaining parts to build a correct proof that is guaranteed to be sound, despite the reliance on unsound LLMs. We evaluate Cobblestone on four benchmarks of open-source Coq projects, controlling for training data leakage. Fully automatically, Cobblestone outperforms state-of-the-art non-LLM tools, and proves many theorems that other LLM-based tools cannot, and on many benchmarks, outperforms them. Each Cobblestone run costs only $1.25 and takes 14.7 minutes, on average. Cobblestone can also be used with external input, from a user or another tool, providing a proof structure or relevant lemmas. Evaluated with such an oracle, Cobblestone proves up to 58% of theorems. Overall, our research shows that tools can make use of partial progress and external input to more effectively automate formal verification.

citation-role summary

background 4

citation-polarity summary

years

2026 7 2025 1

roles

background 4

polarities

background 4

clear filters

representative citing papers

Certified Program Synthesis with a Multi-Modal Verifier

cs.SE · 2026-04-17 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

LeetProof achieves higher rates of fully certified program synthesis from natural language by using a multi-modal verifier in Lean to validate specifications via randomized testing and delegate proofs to AI tools, outperforming single-mode baselines on benchmarks while uncovering defects in prior参考.

The Search for Constrained Random Generators

cs.PL · 2025-11-15 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

A Lean library called Palamedes uses synthesis rules from generator semantics and catamorphism-anamorphism rewriting to automatically produce correct constrained random generators.

On Reasoning-Centric LLM-based Automated Theorem Proving

cs.SE · 2026-04-21 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

ReCent-Prover achieves a 22.58% relative improvement over prior state-of-the-art in proved theorems on the CoqStoq benchmark by using reasoning-centric techniques under a fixed LLM invocation budget.

citing papers explorer

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers after filters.