REVIEW 3 major objections 4 minor 42 references
Advocate for Complete Benchmarks for Formal Reasoning with Formal/Informal Statements and Formal/Informal Proofs
T0 review · 3 major / 4 minor · reviewed 2026-08-06 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read A formal-reasoning benchmark is only complete when it ships statements and proofs in both formal and informal language, verified by its creators.
desk verdict Useful position paper on benchmark completeness for formal reasoning; the headline re-evaluation numbers lack a protocol and the feasibility estimate omits half the work—worth refereeing. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The load-bearing object is the four-part complete benchmark: formal statement, informal statement, formal proof, and informal proof. It carries the argument because each part does distinct work: formal proofs certify provability, informal statements anchor autoformalization, informal proofs let humans and LLMs compare reasoning, and formal statements define the automated-theorem-proving task. The second mechanism is the human expert check on LLM judges: the paper's own reproduction of the Herald pipeline yields 97 percent while a Lean expert's manual check yields 67 percent, which is the concrete evidence that unverified automated evaluation inflates accuracy.
What would settle it
Select a recently released ATP benchmark of a few hundred problems, time a Lean-proficient researcher to write and verify the formal proofs for all of them, and see whether the total effort fits the paper's 'few months' estimate; if the true cost is several person-years, the proposed completeness norm would make benchmark creation prohibitive for small teams. Independently, take the reported 97 percent autoformalization accuracy and have two Lean experts manually check the same sample; a much smaller gap than the reported 97-to-67 would weaken the claim that LLM judges systematically inflate accuracy.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
The central claim is normative: benchmarks for formal reasoning should be complete, meaning they should contain formal problem statements, informal problem statements, formal proofs, and informal proofs, with the creators verifying all four components before release. Completeness is not decoration; it is what guarantees that every theorem in a benchmark is provable and that the informal and formal versions actually say the same thing. The paper also claims that evaluation of autoformalization cannot yet be delegated to an LLM judge, reporting that the literature's state-of-the-art accuracy of 97 percent drops to 67 percent under manual expert checking. The supporting observation is that incomplete benchmarks create parallel redundant labor and hide how far model outputs are from correct proofs, while the reported 97-versus-67 gap shows that unvalidated automated evaluation can mislead the field.
Load-bearing premise
The argument assumes a person already fluent in Lean can write and verify formal proofs for all theorems in a typical benchmark within a few months, so requiring verified proofs for every new benchmark is a reasonable cost for its creators.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- Future ATP benchmarks will be expected to ship all four components, making unprovable or misformalized theorems detectable at release time rather than years later.
- Autoformalization accuracy claims will need human verification or a validated LLM judge before being published as state of the art.
- Releasing formal proofs for existing benchmarks will reduce redundant manual proof-writing and let small research groups study failure cases without first learning Lean.
- Evaluation reports will include proof lengths, solver-only proofs, and training-data transparency alongside raw accuracy.
- Benchmark creators, not the community, will bear the burden of completing and correcting the data, shifting how credit is assigned in the field.
Reading between the lines
- A likely consequence the paper does not spell out is a two-tier benchmark ecosystem: large well-funded groups can meet the completeness norm, while small groups may shift toward conjecturing or informal-reasoning benchmarks that do not require formal proofs.
- The 97-to-67 gap suggests a calibration path: LLM judges could be retained but must first be validated on human-checked samples, turning the paper's warning into a concrete evaluation protocol.
- Complete benchmarks could become living artifacts with versioned errata and proof updates, since a one-time proof check does not guard against future changes in a formal library such as Lean's Mathlib.
- If completeness becomes standard, accuracy on a benchmark may saturate quickly, pushing the field toward harder signals such as proof length, proof quality, or difficulty-weighted pass rates rather than binary success.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. This position paper argues that the formal reasoning and automated theorem proving community should adopt a norm of "complete" benchmarks, defined as containing formal and informal problem statements together with formal and informal proofs, all verified by the benchmark creators. It further advocates open release of training data, fine-tuning and evaluation code, and formal proofs; criticizes current practices such as withholding proofs and relying on LLM judges for autoformalization evaluation; and reports several concrete alleged failures, including errors in miniF2F, an incomplete BFS-Prover proof, and a claimed 97%-versus-67% discrepancy between LLM-judged and human-checked accuracy for the Herald system. The paper is explicitly a position piece rather than an empirical study, and its central recommendation is normative.
Significance. If its empirical claims withstand scrutiny, the paper identifies a real and timely problem: benchmark incompleteness and opaque evaluation practices can distort progress measures in formal reasoning. The concrete examples—miniF2F errors, the swap-ending BFS-Prover proof, DeepSeek-Prover's use of the validation set, and the Herald evaluation discrepancy—are valuable and falsifiable. The proposed four-component completeness criterion is a clear, actionable standard that could improve dataset quality and lower barriers for researchers who are not Lean experts. The paper does not ship machine-checked proofs, reproducible code, or a formal derivation; its contribution is as a critical position statement. Its main weakness is that the most striking empirical assertions are not accompanied by protocols, data, or artifacts, and the feasibility assumption underlying the central proposal is asserted rather than demonstrated.
major comments (3)
- [§4.2] The claim that Herald's reported 97% accuracy is actually 67% under manual checking is load-bearing for the paper's position on LLM-based evaluation, but no protocol is described: the sample size, selection criteria, definition of a correct translation, number of human annotators, inter-annotator agreement, and examples of disagreements are all absent. Without this information the reader cannot assess whether the discrepancy is real, how large it is, or whether the manual check used a stricter standard than the benchmark's own ground truth. The authors should provide the full re-evaluation protocol and ideally release the annotated judgments.
- [§1.1 and §3, item 3] The central proposal that all new ATP benchmarks should ship verified formal proofs, informal proofs, and matching informal statements rests on the feasibility assumption that 'a person familiar with Lean can write the formal proofs for all the problems in the dataset in a time frame of several months.' This claim is unsupported: no time logs, no release artifacts, and no independent replication are cited. The estimate also appears to omit two of the four required components: writing high-quality informal proofs and cross-checking formal-informal statement equivalence, which §3 item 3 itself says is mismatched for about half of miniF2F. The authors should supply concrete cost evidence or explicitly restrict the completeness norm to benchmarks where the creators can realistically produce all four components, otherwise the proposal may inadvertently favor large industrial teams with extensive formalization resources, recreating the barrier the paper argues against.
- [§5] The argument that releasing proofs does not devalue a benchmark depends on the assertion that after the release of the IMO proofs in miniF2F, 'most of those problems remain unproved by the best provers.' This is an empirical claim presented without a specification of which models were tested, under what attempt budgets, on which theorem set, and as of what date. Since the paper elsewhere criticizes evaluations that omit such details, it should hold its own counterargument to the same standard, e.g., by reporting the evaluation configuration or citing a public reproducible evaluation.
minor comments (4)
- [§2, item 1] The reference to 'Hu et al.' is incomplete; the bibliography lists a paper by Hu, Zhu, and Welleck (miniCTX) but the in-text citation lacks both the year and the full author list, making it hard to locate.
- [§4.1, item 3] There is a typo in 'The staring point for ATP models'—it should read 'starting point.'
- [Appendix A] In the sentence 'because the correctness and speed of any such algorithm can be easily verified automatically by a Python script,' the word 'vbe' appears as a typo for 'be.'
- [§4.1, item 1] The claim about DeepSeek-Prover v1.5 being trained on the miniF2F validation set and the reported 64% pass@32 accuracy would benefit from a precise pointer to the relevant passage in the cited work and a description of the authors' own evaluation setup, since this example is used to argue for transparency.
Circularity Check
No significant circularity: the paper is a normative position essay, not a derivation, and its central claims are supported by external examples and independent manual checks.
full rationale
This is a position paper advocating for complete benchmarks in formal reasoning, rather than a paper deriving predictions from fitted inputs. Its central proposal—that new ATP benchmarks should include formal statements, informal statements, formal proofs, and informal proofs—is a normative recommendation supported by community-practice arguments, examples such as miniF2F and Putnam Bench, and the authors' reported manual re-evaluation of Herald's 97% accuracy down to 67%. None of these steps reduces to the proposal itself by construction. The only self-citation, Yousefzadeh et al. (2025), appears in Section 5 as evidence that releasing IMO proofs did not devalue miniF2F; this is ancillary to the main advocacy and refers to a released dataset artifact, so it is not load-bearing circularity. The paper's feasibility assumption that one Lean-literate person can write formal proofs for all problems in several months is an unsupported cost estimate, but unsupported empirical claims are a correctness or robustness concern, not circularity. No fitted parameter is renamed as a prediction, no uniqueness theorem from the authors is imported to force a choice, and no known result is merely relabeled. The core arguments are self-contained against external benchmarks and community practices.
Assumptions & free parameters
assumptions (4)
- domain assumption Lean's formal verification is an authoritative ground truth for proof correctness.
- domain assumption The primary goal of the field is collective accelerated progress, so community norms that create barriers are to be reduced.
- ad hoc to paper Releasing ground-truth proofs will not lead to trivial saturation of benchmarks because training models to reproduce proofs is nontrivial.
- ad hoc to paper A single person familiar with Lean can write formal proofs for all miniF2F theorems within a few months.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Advocate for Complete Benchmarks for Formal Reasoning with Formal/Informal Statements and Formal/Informal Proofs." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/CPZWOG7U
@misc{pith2026250704719,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Advocate for Complete Benchmarks for Formal Reasoning with Formal/Informal Statements and Formal/Informal Proofs},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/CPZWOG7U}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2507.04719}
}
read the original abstract
This position paper provides a critical but constructive discussion of current practices in benchmarking and evaluative practices in the field of formal reasoning and automated theorem proving. We take the position that open code, open data, and benchmarks that are complete and error-free will accelerate progress in this field. We identify practices that create barriers to contributing to this field and suggest ways to remove them. We also discuss some of the practices that might produce misleading evaluative information. We aim to create discussions that bring together people from various groups contributing to automated theorem proving, autoformalization, and informal reasoning.
Reference graph
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Reviewed August 6, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
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