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Dec 12

CircuitSense: A Hierarchical Circuit System Benchmark Bridging Visual Comprehension and Symbolic Reasoning in Engineering Design Process

Engineering design operates through hierarchical abstraction from system specifications to component implementations, requiring visual understanding coupled with mathematical reasoning at each level. While Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at natural image tasks, their ability to extract mathematical models from technical diagrams remains unexplored. We present CircuitSense, a comprehensive benchmark evaluating circuit understanding across this hierarchy through 8,006+ problems spanning component-level schematics to system-level block diagrams. Our benchmark uniquely examines the complete engineering workflow: Perception, Analysis, and Design, with a particular emphasis on the critical but underexplored capability of deriving symbolic equations from visual inputs. We introduce a hierarchical synthetic generation pipeline consisting of a grid-based schematic generator and a block diagram generator with auto-derived symbolic equation labels. Comprehensive evaluation of six state-of-the-art MLLMs, including both closed-source and open-source models, reveals fundamental limitations in visual-to-mathematical reasoning. Closed-source models achieve over 85\% accuracy on perception tasks involving component recognition and topology identification, yet their performance on symbolic derivation and analytical reasoning falls below 19\%, exposing a critical gap between visual parsing and symbolic reasoning. Models with stronger symbolic reasoning capabilities consistently achieve higher design task accuracy, confirming the fundamental role of mathematical understanding in circuit synthesis and establishing symbolic reasoning as the key metric for engineering competence.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 26

RSRM: Reinforcement Symbolic Regression Machine

In nature, the behaviors of many complex systems can be described by parsimonious math equations. Automatically distilling these equations from limited data is cast as a symbolic regression process which hitherto remains a grand challenge. Keen efforts in recent years have been placed on tackling this issue and demonstrated success in symbolic regression. However, there still exist bottlenecks that current methods struggle to break when the discrete search space tends toward infinity and especially when the underlying math formula is intricate. To this end, we propose a novel Reinforcement Symbolic Regression Machine (RSRM) that masters the capability of uncovering complex math equations from only scarce data. The RSRM model is composed of three key modules: (1) a Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) agent that explores optimal math expression trees consisting of pre-defined math operators and variables, (2) a Double Q-learning block that helps reduce the feasible search space of MCTS via properly understanding the distribution of reward, and (3) a modulated sub-tree discovery block that heuristically learns and defines new math operators to improve representation ability of math expression trees. Biding of these modules yields the state-of-the-art performance of RSRM in symbolic regression as demonstrated by multiple sets of benchmark examples. The RSRM model shows clear superiority over several representative baseline models.

  • 3 authors
·
May 23, 2023

Generating Mathematical Derivations with Large Language Models

The derivation of mathematical results in specialised fields using Large Language Models (LLMs) is an emerging research direction that can help identify models' limitations, and potentially support mathematical discovery. In this paper, we leverage a symbolic engine to generate derivations of equations at scale, and investigate the capabilities of LLMs when deriving goal equations from premises. Specifically, we employ in-context learning for GPT and fine-tune a range of T5 models to compare the robustness and generalisation of pre-training strategies to specialised models. Empirical results show that fine-tuned FLAN-T5-large (MathT5) outperforms GPT models on all static and out-of-distribution test sets in terms of absolute performance. However, an in-depth analysis reveals that the fine-tuned models are more sensitive to perturbations involving unseen symbols and (to a lesser extent) changes to equation structure. In addition, we analyse 1.7K equations and over 200 derivations to highlight common reasoning errors such as the inclusion of incorrect, irrelevant, and redundant equations, along with the tendency to skip derivation steps. Finally, we explore the suitability of existing metrics for evaluating mathematical derivations finding evidence that, while they capture general properties such as sensitivity to perturbations, they fail to highlight fine-grained reasoning errors and essential differences between models. Overall, this work demonstrates that training models on synthetic data can improve their mathematical capabilities beyond larger architectures.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 19, 2023

SNIP: Bridging Mathematical Symbolic and Numeric Realms with Unified Pre-training

In an era where symbolic mathematical equations are indispensable for modeling complex natural phenomena, scientific inquiry often involves collecting observations and translating them into mathematical expressions. Recently, deep learning has emerged as a powerful tool for extracting insights from data. However, existing models typically specialize in either numeric or symbolic domains, and are usually trained in a supervised manner tailored to specific tasks. This approach neglects the substantial benefits that could arise from a task-agnostic unified understanding between symbolic equations and their numeric counterparts. To bridge the gap, we introduce SNIP, a Symbolic-Numeric Integrated Pre-training, which employs joint contrastive learning between symbolic and numeric domains, enhancing their mutual similarities in the pre-trained embeddings. By performing latent space analysis, we observe that SNIP provides cross-domain insights into the representations, revealing that symbolic supervision enhances the embeddings of numeric data and vice versa. We evaluate SNIP across diverse tasks, including symbolic-to-numeric mathematical property prediction and numeric-to-symbolic equation discovery, commonly known as symbolic regression. Results show that SNIP effectively transfers to various tasks, consistently outperforming fully supervised baselines and competing strongly with established task-specific methods, especially in few-shot learning scenarios where available data is limited.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 3, 2023

A Neural-Guided Dynamic Symbolic Network for Exploring Mathematical Expressions from Data

Symbolic regression (SR) is a powerful technique for discovering the underlying mathematical expressions from observed data. Inspired by the success of deep learning, recent efforts have focused on two categories for SR methods. One is using a neural network or genetic programming to search the expression tree directly. Although this has shown promising results, the large search space poses difficulties in learning constant factors and processing high-dimensional problems. Another approach is leveraging a transformer-based model training on synthetic data and offers advantages in inference speed. However, this method is limited to fixed small numbers of dimensions and may encounter inference problems when given data is out-of-distribution compared to the synthetic data. In this work, we propose DySymNet, a novel neural-guided Dynamic Symbolic Network for SR. Instead of searching for expressions within a large search space, we explore DySymNet with various structures and optimize them to identify expressions that better-fitting the data. With a topology structure like neural networks, DySymNet not only tackles the challenge of high-dimensional problems but also proves effective in optimizing constants. Based on extensive numerical experiments using low-dimensional public standard benchmarks and the well-known SRBench with more variables, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of fitting accuracy and robustness to noise.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 24, 2023

High-performance symbolic-numerics via multiple dispatch

As mathematical computing becomes more democratized in high-level languages, high-performance symbolic-numeric systems are necessary for domain scientists and engineers to get the best performance out of their machine without deep knowledge of code optimization. Naturally, users need different term types either to have different algebraic properties for them, or to use efficient data structures. To this end, we developed Symbolics.jl, an extendable symbolic system which uses dynamic multiple dispatch to change behavior depending on the domain needs. In this work we detail an underlying abstract term interface which allows for speed without sacrificing generality. We show that by formalizing a generic API on actions independent of implementation, we can retroactively add optimized data structures to our system without changing the pre-existing term rewriters. We showcase how this can be used to optimize term construction and give a 113x acceleration on general symbolic transformations. Further, we show that such a generic API allows for complementary term-rewriting implementations. We demonstrate the ability to swap between classical term-rewriting simplifiers and e-graph-based term-rewriting simplifiers. We showcase an e-graph ruleset which minimizes the number of CPU cycles during expression evaluation, and demonstrate how it simplifies a real-world reaction-network simulation to halve the runtime. Additionally, we show a reaction-diffusion partial differential equation solver which is able to be automatically converted into symbolic expressions via multiple dispatch tracing, which is subsequently accelerated and parallelized to give a 157x simulation speedup. Together, this presents Symbolics.jl as a next-generation symbolic-numeric computing environment geared towards modeling and simulation.

  • 7 authors
·
May 9, 2021

A PINN Approach to Symbolic Differential Operator Discovery with Sparse Data

Given ample experimental data from a system governed by differential equations, it is possible to use deep learning techniques to construct the underlying differential operators. In this work we perform symbolic discovery of differential operators in a situation where there is sparse experimental data. This small data regime in machine learning can be made tractable by providing our algorithms with prior information about the underlying dynamics. Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have been very successful in this regime (reconstructing entire ODE solutions using only a single point or entire PDE solutions with very few measurements of the initial condition). We modify the PINN approach by adding a neural network that learns a representation of unknown hidden terms in the differential equation. The algorithm yields both a surrogate solution to the differential equation and a black-box representation of the hidden terms. These hidden term neural networks can then be converted into symbolic equations using symbolic regression techniques like AI Feynman. In order to achieve convergence of these neural networks, we provide our algorithms with (noisy) measurements of both the initial condition as well as (synthetic) experimental data obtained at later times. We demonstrate strong performance of this approach even when provided with very few measurements of noisy data in both the ODE and PDE regime.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 8, 2022

SURFACEBENCH: Can Self-Evolving LLMs Find the Equations of 3D Scientific Surfaces?

Equation discovery from data is a core challenge in machine learning for science, requiring the recovery of concise symbolic expressions that govern complex physical and geometric phenomena. Recent approaches with large language models (LLMs) show promise in symbolic regression, but their success often hinges on memorized formulas or overly simplified functional forms. Existing benchmarks exacerbate this limitation: they focus on scalar functions, ignore domain grounding, and rely on brittle string-matching based metrics that fail to capture scientific equivalence. We introduce SurfaceBench, first comprehensive benchmark for symbolic surface discovery. SurfaceBench comprises 183 tasks across 15 categories of symbolic complexity, spanning explicit, implicit, and parametric equation representation forms. Each task includes ground-truth equations, variable semantics, and synthetically sampled three dimensional data. Unlike prior SR datasets, our tasks reflect surface-level structure, resist LLM memorization through novel symbolic compositions, and are grounded in scientific domains such as fluid dynamics, robotics, electromagnetics, and geometry. To evaluate equation discovery quality, we pair symbolic checks with geometry-aware metrics such as Chamfer and Hausdorff distances, capturing both algebraic fidelity and spatial reconstruction accuracy. Our experiments reveal that state-of-the-art frameworks, while occasionally successful on specific families, struggle to generalize across representation types and surface complexities. SurfaceBench thus establishes a challenging and diagnostic testbed that bridges symbolic reasoning with geometric reconstruction, enabling principled benchmarking of progress in compositional generalization, data-driven scientific induction, and geometry-aware reasoning with LLMs. We release the code here: https://github.com/Sanchit-404/surfacebench

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 13

SymbolicAI: A framework for logic-based approaches combining generative models and solvers

We introduce SymbolicAI, a versatile and modular framework employing a logic-based approach to concept learning and flow management in generative processes. SymbolicAI enables the seamless integration of generative models with a diverse range of solvers by treating large language models (LLMs) as semantic parsers that execute tasks based on both natural and formal language instructions, thus bridging the gap between symbolic reasoning and generative AI. We leverage probabilistic programming principles to tackle complex tasks, and utilize differentiable and classical programming paradigms with their respective strengths. The framework introduces a set of polymorphic, compositional, and self-referential operations for data stream manipulation, aligning LLM outputs with user objectives. As a result, we can transition between the capabilities of various foundation models endowed with zero- and few-shot learning capabilities and specialized, fine-tuned models or solvers proficient in addressing specific problems. In turn, the framework facilitates the creation and evaluation of explainable computational graphs. We conclude by introducing a quality measure and its empirical score for evaluating these computational graphs, and propose a benchmark that compares various state-of-the-art LLMs across a set of complex workflows. We refer to the empirical score as the "Vector Embedding for Relational Trajectory Evaluation through Cross-similarity", or VERTEX score for short. The framework codebase and benchmark are linked below.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 1, 2024 5

Rethinking Symbolic Regression Datasets and Benchmarks for Scientific Discovery

This paper revisits datasets and evaluation criteria for Symbolic Regression, a task of expressing given data using mathematical equations, specifically focused on its potential for scientific discovery. Focused on a set of formulas used in the existing datasets based on Feynman Lectures on Physics, we recreate 120 datasets to discuss the performance of symbolic regression for scientific discovery (SRSD). For each of the 120 SRSD datasets, we carefully review the properties of the formula and its variables to design reasonably realistic sampling range of values so that our new SRSD datasets can be used for evaluating the potential of SRSD such as whether or not an SR method can (re)discover physical laws from such datasets. As an evaluation metric, we also propose to use normalized edit distances between a predicted equation and the ground-truth equation trees. While existing metrics are either binary or errors between the target values and an SR model's predicted values for a given input, normalized edit distances evaluate a sort of similarity between the ground-truth and predicted equation trees. We have conducted experiments on our new SRSD datasets using five state-of-the-art SR methods in SRBench and a simple baseline based on a recent Transformer architecture. The results show that we provide a more realistic performance evaluation and open up a new machine learning-based approach for scientific discovery. Our datasets and code repository are publicly available.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 21, 2022

Speech-to-LaTeX: New Models and Datasets for Converting Spoken Equations and Sentences

Conversion of spoken mathematical expressions is a challenging task that involves transcribing speech into a strictly structured symbolic representation while addressing the ambiguity inherent in the pronunciation of equations. Although significant progress has been achieved in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and language models (LM), the problem of converting spoken mathematics into LaTeX remains underexplored. This task directly applies to educational and research domains, such as lecture transcription or note creation. Based on ASR post-correction, prior work requires 2 transcriptions, focuses only on isolated equations, has a limited test set, and provides neither training data nor multilingual coverage. To address these issues, we present the first fully open-source large-scale dataset, comprising over 66,000 human-annotated audio samples of mathematical equations and sentences in both English and Russian, drawn from diverse scientific domains. In addition to the ASR post-correction models and few-shot prompting, we apply audio language models, demonstrating comparable character error rate (CER) results on the MathSpeech benchmark (28% vs. 30%) for the equations conversion. In contrast, on the proposed S2L-equations benchmark, our models outperform the MathSpeech model by a substantial margin of more than 40 percentage points, even after accounting for LaTeX formatting artifacts (27% vs. 64%). We establish the first benchmark for mathematical sentence recognition (S2L-sentences) and achieve an equation CER of 40%. This work lays the groundwork for future advances in multimodal AI, with a particular focus on mathematical content recognition.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 5 2

ASyMOB: Algebraic Symbolic Mathematical Operations Benchmark

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly approaching the level of proficiency in university-level symbolic mathematics required for applications in advanced science and technology. However, existing benchmarks fall short in assessing the core skills of LLMs in symbolic mathematics-such as integration, differential equations, and algebraic simplification. To address this gap, we introduce ASyMOB, a novel assessment framework focused exclusively on symbolic manipulation, featuring 17,092 unique math challenges, organized by similarity and complexity. ASyMOB enables analysis of LLM generalization capabilities by comparing performance in problems that differ by simple numerical or symbolic `perturbations'. Evaluated LLMs exhibit substantial degradation in performance for all perturbation types (up to -70.3%), suggesting reliance on memorized patterns rather than deeper understanding of symbolic math, even among models achieving high baseline accuracy. Comparing LLM performance to computer algebra systems, we identify examples where they fail while LLMs succeed, as well as problems solved only by combining both approaches. Models capable of integrated code execution yielded higher accuracy compared to their performance without code, particularly stabilizing weaker models (up to +33.1% for certain perturbation types). Notably, the most advanced models (o4-mini, Gemini 2.5 Flash) demonstrate not only high symbolic math proficiency (scoring 96.8% and 97.6% on the unperturbed set), but also remarkable robustness against perturbations, (-21.7% and -21.2% vs. average -50.4% for the other models). This may indicate a recent "phase transition" in the generalization capabilities of frontier LLMs. It remains to be seen whether the path forward lies in deeper integration with sophisticated external tools, or in developing models so capable that symbolic math systems like CAS become unnecessary.

  • 3 authors
·
May 28

Bridging Formal Language with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning to Geometry Problem Solving

Large vision language models exhibit notable limitations on Geometry Problem Solving (GPS) because of their unreliable diagram interpretation and pure natural-language reasoning. A recent line of work mitigates this by using symbolic solvers: the model directly generates a formal program that a geometry solver can execute. However, this direct program generation lacks intermediate reasoning, making the decision process opaque and prone to errors. In this work, we explore a new approach that integrates Chain-of-Thought (CoT) with formal language. The model interleaves natural language reasoning with incremental emission of solver-executable code, producing a hybrid reasoning trace in which critical derivations are expressed in formal language. To teach this behavior at scale, we combine (1) supervised fine-tuning on an 11K newly developed synthetic dataset with interleaved natural language reasoning and automatic formalization, and (2) solver-in-the-loop reinforcement learning that jointly optimizes both the CoT narrative and the resulting program through outcome-based rewards. Built on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, our new model, named GF-Reasoner, achieves up to 15% accuracy improvements on standard GPS benchmarks, surpassing both 7B-scale peers and the much larger model Qwen2.5-VL-72B. By exploiting high-order geometric knowledge and offloading symbolic computation to the solver, the generated reasoning traces are noticeably shorter and cleaner. Furthermore, we present a comprehensive analysis of method design choices (e.g., reasoning paradigms, data synthesis, training epochs, etc.), providing actionable insights for future research.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 12

CoEvo: Continual Evolution of Symbolic Solutions Using Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as transformative tools in artificial intelligence, capable of processing and understanding extensive human knowledge to enhance problem-solving across various domains. This paper explores the potential of LLMs to drive the discovery of symbolic solutions within scientific and engineering disciplines, where such solutions are crucial for advancing theoretical and practical applications. We propose a novel framework that utilizes LLMs in an evolutionary search methodology, augmented by a dynamic knowledge library that integrates and refines insights in an open-ended manner. This approach aims to tackle the dual challenges of efficiently navigating complex symbolic representation spaces and leveraging both existing and newly generated knowledge to foster open-ended innovation. By enabling LLMs to interact with and expand upon a knowledge library, we facilitate the continuous generation of novel solutions in diverse forms such as language, code, and mathematical expressions. Our experimental results demonstrate that this method not only enhances the efficiency of searching for symbolic solutions but also supports the ongoing discovery process, akin to human scientific endeavors. This study represents a first effort in conceptualizing the search for symbolic solutions as a lifelong, iterative process, marking a significant step towards harnessing AI in the perpetual pursuit of scientific and engineering breakthroughs. We have open-sourced our code and data, please visit https://github.com/pgg3/CoEvo for more information.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 25, 2024

Can Large Language Models Understand Symbolic Graphics Programs?

Assessing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is often challenging, in part, because it is hard to find tasks to which they have not been exposed during training. We take one step to address this challenge by turning to a new task: focusing on symbolic graphics programs, which are a popular representation for graphics content that procedurally generates visual data. LLMs have shown exciting promise towards program synthesis, but do they understand symbolic graphics programs? Unlike conventional programs, symbolic graphics programs can be translated to graphics content. Here, we characterize an LLM's understanding of symbolic programs in terms of their ability to answer questions related to the graphics content. This task is challenging as the questions are difficult to answer from the symbolic programs alone -- yet, they would be easy to answer from the corresponding graphics content as we verify through a human experiment. To understand symbolic programs, LLMs may need to possess the ability to imagine how the corresponding graphics content would look without directly accessing the rendered visual content. We use this task to evaluate LLMs by creating a large benchmark for the semantic understanding of symbolic graphics programs. This benchmark is built via program-graphics correspondence, hence requiring minimal human efforts. We evaluate current LLMs on our benchmark to elucidate a preliminary assessment of their ability to reason about visual scenes from programs. We find that this task distinguishes existing LLMs and models considered good at reasoning perform better. Lastly, we introduce Symbolic Instruction Tuning (SIT) to improve this ability. Specifically, we query GPT4-o with questions and images generated by symbolic programs. Such data are then used to finetune an LLM. We also find that SIT data can improve the general instruction following ability of LLMs.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 15, 2024 2

Executable Functional Abstractions: Inferring Generative Programs for Advanced Math Problems

Scientists often infer abstract procedures from specific instances of problems and use the abstractions to generate new, related instances. For example, programs encoding the formal rules and properties of a system have been useful in fields ranging from RL (procedural environments) to physics (simulation engines). These programs can be seen as functions which execute to different outputs based on their parameterizations (e.g., gridworld configuration or initial physical conditions). We introduce the term EFA (Executable Functional Abstraction) to denote such programs for math problems. EFA-like constructs have been shown to be useful for math reasoning as problem generators for stress-testing models. However, prior work has been limited to abstractions for grade-school math (whose simple rules are easy to encode in programs), while generating EFAs for advanced math has thus far required human engineering. We explore the automatic construction of EFAs for advanced math problems. We operationalize the task of automatically constructing EFAs as a program synthesis task, and develop EFAGen, which conditions an LLM on a seed math problem and its step-by-step solution to generate candidate EFA programs that are faithful to the generalized problem and solution class underlying the seed problem. Furthermore, we formalize properties any valid EFA must possess in terms of executable unit tests, and show how the tests can be used as verifiable rewards to train LLMs to become better writers of EFAs. We demonstrate that EFAs constructed by EFAGen behave rationally by remaining faithful to seed problems, produce learnable problem variations, and that EFAGen can infer EFAs across multiple diverse sources of competition-level math problems. Finally, we show downstream uses of model-written EFAs e.g. finding problem variations that are harder or easier for a learner to solve, as well as data generation.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 13 2

Math Agents: Computational Infrastructure, Mathematical Embedding, and Genomics

The advancement in generative AI could be boosted with more accessible mathematics. Beyond human-AI chat, large language models (LLMs) are emerging in programming, algorithm discovery, and theorem proving, yet their genomics application is limited. This project introduces Math Agents and mathematical embedding as fresh entries to the "Moore's Law of Mathematics", using a GPT-based workflow to convert equations from literature into LaTeX and Python formats. While many digital equation representations exist, there's a lack of automated large-scale evaluation tools. LLMs are pivotal as linguistic user interfaces, providing natural language access for human-AI chat and formal languages for large-scale AI-assisted computational infrastructure. Given the infinite formal possibility spaces, Math Agents, which interact with math, could potentially shift us from "big data" to "big math". Math, unlike the more flexible natural language, has properties subject to proof, enabling its use beyond traditional applications like high-validation math-certified icons for AI alignment aims. This project aims to use Math Agents and mathematical embeddings to address the ageing issue in information systems biology by applying multiscalar physics mathematics to disease models and genomic data. Generative AI with episodic memory could help analyse causal relations in longitudinal health records, using SIR Precision Health models. Genomic data is suggested for addressing the unsolved Alzheimer's disease problem.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 4, 2023

MathCoder2: Better Math Reasoning from Continued Pretraining on Model-translated Mathematical Code

Code has been shown to be effective in enhancing the mathematical reasoning abilities of large language models due to its precision and accuracy. Previous works involving continued mathematical pretraining often include code that utilizes math-related packages, which are primarily designed for fields such as engineering, machine learning, signal processing, or module testing, rather than being directly focused on mathematical reasoning. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for generating mathematical code accompanied with corresponding reasoning steps for continued pretraining. Our approach begins with the construction of a high-quality mathematical continued pretraining dataset by incorporating math-related web data, code using mathematical packages, math textbooks, and synthetic data. Next, we construct reasoning steps by extracting LaTeX expressions, the conditions needed for the expressions, and the results of the expressions from the previously collected dataset. Based on this extracted information, we generate corresponding code to accurately capture the mathematical reasoning process. Appending the generated code to each reasoning step results in data consisting of paired natural language reasoning steps and their corresponding code. Combining this data with the original dataset results in a 19.2B-token high-performing mathematical pretraining corpus, which we name MathCode-Pile. Training several popular base models with this corpus significantly improves their mathematical abilities, leading to the creation of the MathCoder2 family of models. All of our data processing and training code is open-sourced, ensuring full transparency and easy reproducibility of the entire data collection and training pipeline. The code is released at https://github.com/mathllm/MathCoder2 .

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 10, 2024 2

Symbolic Graphics Programming with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) excel at program synthesis, yet their ability to produce symbolic graphics programs (SGPs) that render into precise visual content remains underexplored. We study symbolic graphics programming, where the goal is to generate an SGP from a natural-language description. This task also serves as a lens into how LLMs understand the visual world by prompting them to generate images rendered from SGPs. Among various SGPs, our paper sticks to scalable vector graphics (SVGs). We begin by examining the extent to which LLMs can generate SGPs. To this end, we introduce SGP-GenBench, a comprehensive benchmark covering object fidelity, scene fidelity, and compositionality (attribute binding, spatial relations, numeracy). On SGP-GenBench, we discover that frontier proprietary models substantially outperform open-source models, and performance correlates well with general coding capabilities. Motivated by this gap, we aim to improve LLMs' ability to generate SGPs. We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards approach, where a format-validity gate ensures renderable SVG, and a cross-modal reward aligns text and the rendered image via strong vision encoders (e.g., SigLIP for text-image and DINO for image-image). Applied to Qwen-2.5-7B, our method substantially improves SVG generation quality and semantics, achieving performance on par with frontier systems. We further analyze training dynamics, showing that RL induces (i) finer decomposition of objects into controllable primitives and (ii) contextual details that improve scene coherence. Our results demonstrate that symbolic graphics programming offers a precise and interpretable lens on cross-modal grounding.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 5 7

MATHSENSEI: A Tool-Augmented Large Language Model for Mathematical Reasoning

Tool-augmented Large Language Models (TALM) are known to enhance the skillset of large language models (LLM), thereby, leading to their improved reasoning abilities across many tasks. While, TALMs have been successfully employed in different question-answering benchmarks, their efficacy on complex mathematical reasoning benchmarks, and the potential complimentary benefits offered by tools for knowledge retrieval and mathematical equation solving, are open research questions. In this work, we present MATHSENSEI, a tool-augmented large language model for mathematical reasoning. Augmented with tools for knowledge retrieval (Bing Web Search), program execution (Python), and symbolic equation solving (Wolfram-Alpha), we study the complimentary benefits of these tools through evaluations on mathematical reasoning datasets. We perform exhaustive ablations on MATH,a popular dataset for evaluating mathematical reasoning on diverse mathematical disciplines. We also conduct experiments involving well-known tool planners to study the impact of tool sequencing on the model performance. MATHSENSEI achieves 13.5% better accuracy over gpt-3.5-turbo with chain-of-thought on the MATH dataset. We further observe that TALMs are not as effective for simpler math word problems (in GSM-8k), and the benefit increases as the complexity and required knowledge increases (progressively over AQuA, MMLU-Math, and higher level complex questions in MATH). The code and data are available at https://github.com/Debrup-61/MathSensei.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 27, 2024

Symbolic Synthesis of Neural Networks

Neural networks adapt very well to distributed and continuous representations, but struggle to generalize from small amounts of data. Symbolic systems commonly achieve data efficient generalization by exploiting modularity to benefit from local and discrete features of a representation. These features allow symbolic programs to be improved one module at a time and to experience combinatorial growth in the values they can successfully process. However, it is difficult to design a component that can be used to form symbolic abstractions and which is adequately overparametrized to learn arbitrary high-dimensional transformations. I present Graph-based Symbolically Synthesized Neural Networks (G-SSNNs), a class of neural modules that operate on representations modified with synthesized symbolic programs to include a fixed set of local and discrete features. I demonstrate that the choice of injected features within a G-SSNN module modulates the data efficiency and generalization of baseline neural models, creating predictable patterns of both heightened and curtailed generalization. By training G-SSNNs, we also derive information about desirable semantics of symbolic programs without manual engineering. This information is compact and amenable to abstraction, but can also be flexibly recontextualized for other high-dimensional settings. In future work, I will investigate data efficient generalization and the transferability of learned symbolic representations in more complex G-SSNN designs based on more complex classes of symbolic programs. Experimental code and data are available at https://github.com/shlomenu/symbolically_synthesized_networks .

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 6, 2023

Enumerate-Conjecture-Prove: Formally Solving Answer-Construction Problems in Math Competitions

Mathematical reasoning lies at the heart of artificial intelligence, underpinning applications in education, program verification, and research-level mathematical discovery. Mathematical competitions, in particular, present two challenging problem types: theorem proving, which requires rigorous proofs of stated conclusions, and answer construction, which involves hypothesizing and formally verifying mathematical objects. Large Language Models (LLMs) effectively generate creative candidate answers but struggle with formal verification, while symbolic provers ensure rigor but cannot efficiently handle creative conjecture generation. We introduce the Enumerate-Conjecture-Prove (ECP) framework, a modular neuro-symbolic method integrating LLM-based enumeration and pattern-driven conjecturing with formal theorem proving. We present ConstructiveBench, a dataset of 3,431 answer-construction problems in various math competitions with verified Lean formalizations. On the ConstructiveBench dataset, ECP improves the accuracy of answer construction from a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) baseline of 14.54% to 45.06% with the gpt-4.1-mini model. Moreover, combined with ECP's constructed answers, the state-of-the-art DeepSeek-Prover-V2-7B model generates correct proofs for 858 of the 3,431 constructive problems in Lean, achieving 25.01% accuracy compared to 9.86% for symbolic-only baselines. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/JackSun200312/ECP.

  • 5 authors
·
May 23

GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked interest in their formal reasoning capabilities, particularly in mathematics. The GSM8K benchmark is widely used to assess the mathematical reasoning of models on grade-school-level questions. While the performance of LLMs on GSM8K has significantly improved in recent years, it remains unclear whether their mathematical reasoning capabilities have genuinely advanced, raising questions about the reliability of the reported metrics. To address these concerns, we conduct a large-scale study on several SOTA open and closed models. To overcome the limitations of existing evaluations, we introduce GSM-Symbolic, an improved benchmark created from symbolic templates that allow for the generation of a diverse set of questions. GSM-Symbolic enables more controllable evaluations, providing key insights and more reliable metrics for measuring the reasoning capabilities of models.Our findings reveal that LLMs exhibit noticeable variance when responding to different instantiations of the same question. Specifically, the performance of all models declines when only the numerical values in the question are altered in the GSM-Symbolic benchmark. Furthermore, we investigate the fragility of mathematical reasoning in these models and show that their performance significantly deteriorates as the number of clauses in a question increases. We hypothesize that this decline is because current LLMs cannot perform genuine logical reasoning; they replicate reasoning steps from their training data. Adding a single clause that seems relevant to the question causes significant performance drops (up to 65%) across all state-of-the-art models, even though the clause doesn't contribute to the reasoning chain needed for the final answer. Overall, our work offers a more nuanced understanding of LLMs' capabilities and limitations in mathematical reasoning.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024 6

Alchemy: Amplifying Theorem-Proving Capability through Symbolic Mutation

Formal proofs are challenging to write even for experienced experts. Recent progress in Neural Theorem Proving (NTP) shows promise in expediting this process. However, the formal corpora available on the Internet are limited compared to the general text, posing a significant data scarcity challenge for NTP. To address this issue, this work proposes Alchemy, a general framework for data synthesis that constructs formal theorems through symbolic mutation. Specifically, for each candidate theorem in Mathlib, we identify all invocable theorems that can be used to rewrite or apply to it. Subsequently, we mutate the candidate theorem by replacing the corresponding term in the statement with its equivalent form or antecedent. As a result, our method increases the number of theorems in Mathlib by an order of magnitude, from 110k to 6M. Furthermore, we perform continual pretraining and supervised finetuning on this augmented corpus for large language models. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving a 5% absolute performance improvement on Leandojo benchmark. Additionally, our synthetic data achieve a 2.5% absolute performance gain on the out-of-distribution miniF2F benchmark. To provide further insights, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of synthetic data composition and the training paradigm, offering valuable guidance for developing a strong theorem prover.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 21, 2024 3

A Neural Network Solves, Explains, and Generates University Math Problems by Program Synthesis and Few-Shot Learning at Human Level

We demonstrate that a neural network pre-trained on text and fine-tuned on code solves mathematics course problems, explains solutions, and generates new questions at a human level. We automatically synthesize programs using few-shot learning and OpenAI's Codex transformer and execute them to solve course problems at 81% automatic accuracy. We curate a new dataset of questions from MIT's largest mathematics courses (Single Variable and Multivariable Calculus, Differential Equations, Introduction to Probability and Statistics, Linear Algebra, and Mathematics for Computer Science) and Columbia University's Computational Linear Algebra. We solve questions from a MATH dataset (on Prealgebra, Algebra, Counting and Probability, Intermediate Algebra, Number Theory, and Precalculus), the latest benchmark of advanced mathematics problems designed to assess mathematical reasoning. We randomly sample questions and generate solutions with multiple modalities, including numbers, equations, and plots. The latest GPT-3 language model pre-trained on text automatically solves only 18.8% of these university questions using zero-shot learning and 30.8% using few-shot learning and the most recent chain of thought prompting. In contrast, program synthesis with few-shot learning using Codex fine-tuned on code generates programs that automatically solve 81% of these questions. Our approach improves the previous state-of-the-art automatic solution accuracy on the benchmark topics from 8.8% to 81.1%. We perform a survey to evaluate the quality and difficulty of generated questions. This work is the first to automatically solve university-level mathematics course questions at a human level and the first work to explain and generate university-level mathematics course questions at scale, a milestone for higher education.

  • 18 authors
·
Dec 31, 2021

PAL: Program-aided Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated an impressive ability to perform arithmetic and symbolic reasoning tasks, when provided with a few examples at test time ("few-shot prompting"). Much of this success can be attributed to prompting methods such as "chain-of-thought'', which employ LLMs for both understanding the problem description by decomposing it into steps, as well as solving each step of the problem. While LLMs seem to be adept at this sort of step-by-step decomposition, LLMs often make logical and arithmetic mistakes in the solution part, even when the problem is decomposed correctly. In this paper, we present Program-Aided Language models (PAL): a novel approach that uses the LLM to read natural language problems and generate programs as the intermediate reasoning steps, but offloads the solution step to a runtime such as a Python interpreter. With PAL, decomposing the natural language problem into runnable steps remains the only learning task for the LLM, while solving is delegated to the interpreter. We demonstrate this synergy between a neural LLM and a symbolic interpreter across 13 mathematical, symbolic, and algorithmic reasoning tasks from BIG-Bench Hard and other benchmarks. In all these natural language reasoning tasks, generating code using an LLM and reasoning using a Python interpreter leads to more accurate results than much larger models. For example, PAL using Codex achieves state-of-the-art few-shot accuracy on the GSM8K benchmark of math word problems, surpassing PaLM-540B which uses chain-of-thought by absolute 15% top-1. Our code and data are publicly available at http://reasonwithpal.com/ .

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 18, 2022

LLM-SRBench: A New Benchmark for Scientific Equation Discovery with Large Language Models

Scientific equation discovery is a fundamental task in the history of scientific progress, enabling the derivation of laws governing natural phenomena. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained interest for this task due to their potential to leverage embedded scientific knowledge for hypothesis generation. However, evaluating the true discovery capabilities of these methods remains challenging, as existing benchmarks often rely on common equations that are susceptible to memorization by LLMs, leading to inflated performance metrics that do not reflect discovery. In this paper, we introduce LLM-SRBench, a comprehensive benchmark with 239 challenging problems across four scientific domains specifically designed to evaluate LLM-based scientific equation discovery methods while preventing trivial memorization. Our benchmark comprises two main categories: LSR-Transform, which transforms common physical models into less common mathematical representations to test reasoning beyond memorized forms, and LSR-Synth, which introduces synthetic, discovery-driven problems requiring data-driven reasoning. Through extensive evaluation of several state-of-the-art methods, using both open and closed LLMs, we find that the best-performing system so far achieves only 31.5% symbolic accuracy. These findings highlight the challenges of scientific equation discovery, positioning LLM-SRBench as a valuable resource for future research.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 14 2

PROSE: Predicting Operators and Symbolic Expressions using Multimodal Transformers

Approximating nonlinear differential equations using a neural network provides a robust and efficient tool for various scientific computing tasks, including real-time predictions, inverse problems, optimal controls, and surrogate modeling. Previous works have focused on embedding dynamical systems into networks through two approaches: learning a single solution operator (i.e., the mapping from input parametrized functions to solutions) or learning the governing system of equations (i.e., the constitutive model relative to the state variables). Both of these approaches yield different representations for the same underlying data or function. Additionally, observing that families of differential equations often share key characteristics, we seek one network representation across a wide range of equations. Our method, called Predicting Operators and Symbolic Expressions (PROSE), learns maps from multimodal inputs to multimodal outputs, capable of generating both numerical predictions and mathematical equations. By using a transformer structure and a feature fusion approach, our network can simultaneously embed sets of solution operators for various parametric differential equations using a single trained network. Detailed experiments demonstrate that the network benefits from its multimodal nature, resulting in improved prediction accuracy and better generalization. The network is shown to be able to handle noise in the data and errors in the symbolic representation, including noisy numerical values, model misspecification, and erroneous addition or deletion of terms. PROSE provides a new neural network framework for differential equations which allows for more flexibility and generality in learning operators and governing equations from data.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 28, 2023

Unsupervised Discovery of Formulas for Mathematical Constants

Ongoing efforts that span over decades show a rise of AI methods for accelerating scientific discovery, yet accelerating discovery in mathematics remains a persistent challenge for AI. Specifically, AI methods were not effective in creation of formulas for mathematical constants because each such formula must be correct for infinite digits of precision, with "near-true" formulas providing no insight toward the correct ones. Consequently, formula discovery lacks a clear distance metric needed to guide automated discovery in this realm. In this work, we propose a systematic methodology for categorization, characterization, and pattern identification of such formulas. The key to our methodology is introducing metrics based on the convergence dynamics of the formulas, rather than on the numerical value of the formula. These metrics enable the first automated clustering of mathematical formulas. We demonstrate this methodology on Polynomial Continued Fraction formulas, which are ubiquitous in their intrinsic connections to mathematical constants, and generalize many mathematical functions and structures. We test our methodology on a set of 1,768,900 such formulas, identifying many known formulas for mathematical constants, and discover previously unknown formulas for pi, ln(2), Gauss', and Lemniscate's constants. The uncovered patterns enable a direct generalization of individual formulas to infinite families, unveiling rich mathematical structures. This success paves the way towards a generative model that creates formulas fulfilling specified mathematical properties, accelerating the rate of discovery of useful formulas.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 21, 2024

Symbolic Learning Enables Self-Evolving Agents

The AI community has been exploring a pathway to artificial general intelligence (AGI) by developing "language agents", which are complex large language models (LLMs) pipelines involving both prompting techniques and tool usage methods. While language agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities for many real-world tasks, a fundamental limitation of current language agents research is that they are model-centric, or engineering-centric. That's to say, the progress on prompts, tools, and pipelines of language agents requires substantial manual engineering efforts from human experts rather than automatically learning from data. We believe the transition from model-centric, or engineering-centric, to data-centric, i.e., the ability of language agents to autonomously learn and evolve in environments, is the key for them to possibly achieve AGI. In this work, we introduce agent symbolic learning, a systematic framework that enables language agents to optimize themselves on their own in a data-centric way using symbolic optimizers. Specifically, we consider agents as symbolic networks where learnable weights are defined by prompts, tools, and the way they are stacked together. Agent symbolic learning is designed to optimize the symbolic network within language agents by mimicking two fundamental algorithms in connectionist learning: back-propagation and gradient descent. Instead of dealing with numeric weights, agent symbolic learning works with natural language simulacrums of weights, loss, and gradients. We conduct proof-of-concept experiments on both standard benchmarks and complex real-world tasks and show that agent symbolic learning enables language agents to update themselves after being created and deployed in the wild, resulting in "self-evolving agents".

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 26, 2024 1

Socratic-Zero : Bootstrapping Reasoning via Data-Free Agent Co-evolution

Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) on reasoning tasks rely heavily on massive, high-quality datasets-typically human-annotated and thus difficult to scale. While data synthesis or distillation offers a promising alternative, existing methods struggle with inconsistent data quality and an inability to dynamically adapt to the evolving capabilities of the model, leading to suboptimal training signals. To address these limitations, we introduce Socratic-Zero, a fully autonomous framework that generates high-quality training data from minimal seed examples through the co-evolution of three agents: the Teacher, the Solver, and the Generator. The Solver continuously refines its reasoning by learning from preference feedback on both successful and failed trajectories; the Teacher adaptively crafts increasingly challenging questions based on the Solver's weaknesses; and the Generator distills the Teacher's question-design strategy to enable scalable, high-fidelity curriculum generation. This closed-loop system produces a self-improving curriculum-requiring no pre-existing tasks or labels. Remarkably, starting from only 100 seed questions, our Socratic-Solver-8B achieves an average gain of +20.2 percentage points over prior data synthesis methods across seven mathematical reasoning benchmarks (AMC23, AIME24-25, Olympiad, MATH-500, Minerva, and GSM8K), with consistent gains on both Qwen3 and GLM4 series models. Even more surprisingly, synthetic data from Socratic-Generator-32B enables student LLMs to achieve superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art (SOTA) commercial LLMs on these benchmarks, including Qwen3-235B-A22B, DeepSeek-V3.1-671B, GPT-5, Gemini-2.5-Pro, Grok-4, and Claude-4.1-Opus.

alibaba-inc alibaba-inc
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Sep 29 1

FLARE: Faithful Logic-Aided Reasoning and Exploration

Modern Question Answering (QA) and Reasoning approaches based on Large Language Models (LLMs) commonly use prompting techniques, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), assuming the resulting generation will have a more granular exploration and reasoning over the question space and scope. However, such methods struggle with generating outputs that are faithful to the intermediate chain of reasoning produced by the model. On the other end of the spectrum, neuro-symbolic methods such as Faithful CoT (F-CoT) propose to combine LLMs with external symbolic solvers. While such approaches boast a high degree of faithfulness, they usually require a model trained for code generation and struggle with tasks that are ambiguous or hard to formalise strictly. We introduce Faithful Logic-Aided Reasoning and Exploration (\ours), a novel interpretable approach for traversing the problem space using task decompositions. We use the LLM to plan a solution, soft-formalise the query into facts and predicates using a logic programming code and simulate that code execution using an exhaustive multi-hop search over the defined space. Our method allows us to compute the faithfulness of the reasoning process w.r.t. the generated code and analyse the steps of the multi-hop search without relying on external solvers. Our methods achieve SOTA results on 7 out of 9 diverse reasoning benchmarks. We also show that model faithfulness positively correlates with overall performance and further demonstrate that {\ours} allows pinpointing the decisive factors sufficient for and leading to the correct answer with optimal reasoning during the multi-hop search.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 14, 2024 2

Mathematical exploration and discovery at scale

AlphaEvolve is a generic evolutionary coding agent that combines the generative capabilities of LLMs with automated evaluation in an iterative evolutionary framework that proposes, tests, and refines algorithmic solutions to challenging scientific and practical problems. In this paper we showcase AlphaEvolve as a tool for autonomously discovering novel mathematical constructions and advancing our understanding of long-standing open problems. To demonstrate its breadth, we considered a list of 67 problems spanning mathematical analysis, combinatorics, geometry, and number theory. The system rediscovered the best known solutions in most of the cases and discovered improved solutions in several. In some instances, AlphaEvolve is also able to generalize results for a finite number of input values into a formula valid for all input values. Furthermore, we are able to combine this methodology with Deep Think and AlphaProof in a broader framework where the additional proof-assistants and reasoning systems provide automated proof generation and further mathematical insights. These results demonstrate that large language model-guided evolutionary search can autonomously discover mathematical constructions that complement human intuition, at times matching or even improving the best known results, highlighting the potential for significant new ways of interaction between mathematicians and AI systems. We present AlphaEvolve as a powerful new tool for mathematical discovery, capable of exploring vast search spaces to solve complex optimization problems at scale, often with significantly reduced requirements on preparation and computation time.

Reviving DSP for Advanced Theorem Proving in the Era of Reasoning Models

Recent advancements, such as DeepSeek-Prover-V2-671B and Kimina-Prover-Preview-72B, demonstrate a prevailing trend in leveraging reinforcement learning (RL)-based large-scale training for automated theorem proving. Surprisingly, we discover that even without any training, careful neuro-symbolic coordination of existing off-the-shelf reasoning models and tactic step provers can achieve comparable performance. This paper introduces DSP+, an improved version of the Draft, Sketch, and Prove framework, featuring a fine-grained and integrated neuro-symbolic enhancement for each phase: (1) In the draft phase, we prompt reasoning models to generate concise natural-language subgoals to benefit the sketch phase, removing thinking tokens and references to human-written proofs; (2) In the sketch phase, subgoals are autoformalized with hypotheses to benefit the proving phase, and sketch lines containing syntactic errors are masked according to predefined rules; (3) In the proving phase, we tightly integrate symbolic search methods like Aesop with step provers to establish proofs for the sketch subgoals. Experimental results show that, without any additional model training or fine-tuning, DSP+ solves 80.7\%, 32.8\%, and 24 out of 644 problems from miniF2F, ProofNet, and PutnamBench, respectively, while requiring fewer budgets compared to state-of-the-arts. DSP+ proves imo\_2019\_p1, an IMO problem in miniF2F that is not solved by any prior work. Additionally, DSP+ generates proof patterns comprehensible by human experts, facilitating the identification of formalization errors; For example, eight wrongly formalized statements in miniF2F are discovered. Our results highlight the potential of classical reasoning patterns besides the RL-based training. All components will be open-sourced.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 13

Reliable Fine-Grained Evaluation of Natural Language Math Proofs

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) for mathematical reasoning have largely focused on tasks with easily verifiable final answers; however, generating and verifying natural language math proofs remains an open challenge. We identify the absence of a reliable, fine-grained evaluator for LLM-generated math proofs as a critical gap. To address this, we propose a systematic methodology for developing and validating evaluators that assign fine-grained scores on a 0-7 scale to model-generated math proofs. To enable this study, we introduce ProofBench, the first expert-annotated dataset of fine-grained proof ratings, spanning 145 problems from six major math competitions (USAMO, IMO, Putnam, etc) and 435 LLM-generated solutions from Gemini-2.5-pro, o3, and DeepSeek-R1. %with expert gradings. Using ProofBench as a testbed, we systematically explore the evaluator design space across key axes: the backbone model, input context, instructions and evaluation workflow. Our analysis delivers ProofGrader, an evaluator that combines a strong reasoning backbone LM, rich context from reference solutions and marking schemes, and a simple ensembling method; it achieves a low Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.926 against expert scores, significantly outperforming naive baselines. Finally, we demonstrate its practical utility in a best-of-n selection task: at n=16, ProofGrader achieves an average score of 4.14 (out of 7), closing 78% of the gap between a naive binary evaluator (2.48) and the human oracle (4.62), highlighting its potential to advance downstream proof generation.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 13

MathFimer: Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning by Expanding Reasoning Steps through Fill-in-the-Middle Task

Mathematical reasoning represents a critical frontier in advancing large language models (LLMs). While step-by-step approaches have emerged as the dominant paradigm for mathematical problem-solving in LLMs, the quality of reasoning steps in training data fundamentally constrains the performance of the models. Recent studies has demonstrated that more detailed intermediate steps can enhance model performance, yet existing methods for step expansion either require more powerful external models or incur substantial computational costs. In this paper, we introduce MathFimer, a novel framework for mathematical reasoning step expansion inspired by the "Fill-in-the-middle" task from code completion. By decomposing solution chains into prefix-suffix pairs and training models to reconstruct missing intermediate steps, we develop a specialized model, MathFimer-7B, on our carefully curated NuminaMath-FIM dataset. We then apply these models to enhance existing mathematical reasoning datasets by inserting detailed intermediate steps into their solution chains, creating MathFimer-expanded versions. Through comprehensive experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning datasets, including MathInstruct, MetaMathQA and etc., we demonstrate that models trained on MathFimer-expanded data consistently outperform their counterparts trained on original data across various benchmarks such as GSM8K and MATH. Our approach offers a practical, scalable solution for enhancing mathematical reasoning capabilities in LLMs without relying on powerful external models or expensive inference procedures.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 17

MathSmith: Towards Extremely Hard Mathematical Reasoning by Forging Synthetic Problems with a Reinforced Policy

Large language models have achieved substantial progress in mathematical reasoning, yet their advancement is limited by the scarcity of high-quality, high-difficulty training data. Existing synthesis methods largely rely on transforming human-written templates, limiting both diversity and scalability. We propose MathSmith, a novel framework for synthesizing challenging mathematical problems to enhance LLM reasoning. Rather than modifying existing problems, MathSmith constructs new ones from scratch by randomly sampling concept-explanation pairs from PlanetMath, ensuring data independence and avoiding contamination. To increase difficulty, we design nine predefined strategies as soft constraints during rationales. We further adopts reinforcement learning to jointly optimize structural validity, reasoning complexity, and answer consistency. The length of the reasoning trace generated under autoregressive prompting is used to reflect cognitive complexity, encouraging the creation of more demanding problems aligned with long-chain-of-thought reasoning. Experiments across five benchmarks, categorized as easy & medium (GSM8K, MATH-500) and hard (AIME2024, AIME2025, OlympiadBench), show that MathSmith consistently outperforms existing baselines under both short and long CoT settings. Additionally, a weakness-focused variant generation module enables targeted improvement on specific concepts. Overall, MathSmith exhibits strong scalability, generalization, and transferability, highlighting the promise of high-difficulty synthetic data in advancing LLM reasoning capabilities.

  • 6 authors
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Aug 7

Automated Formalization via Conceptual Retrieval-Augmented LLMs

Interactive theorem provers (ITPs) require manual formalization, which is labor-intensive and demands expert knowledge. While automated formalization offers a potential solution, it faces two major challenges: model hallucination (e.g., undefined predicates, symbol misuse, and version incompatibility) and the semantic gap caused by ambiguous or missing premises in natural language descriptions. To address these issues, we propose CRAMF, a Concept-driven Retrieval-Augmented Mathematical Formalization framework. CRAMF enhances LLM-based autoformalization by retrieving formal definitions of core mathematical concepts, providing contextual grounding during code generation. However, applying retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in this setting is non-trivial due to the lack of structured knowledge bases, the polymorphic nature of mathematical concepts, and the high precision required in formal retrieval. We introduce a framework for automatically constructing a concept-definition knowledge base from Mathlib4, the standard mathematical library for the Lean 4 theorem prover, indexing over 26,000 formal definitions and 1,000+ core mathematical concepts. To address conceptual polymorphism, we propose contextual query augmentation with domain- and application-level signals. In addition, we design a dual-channel hybrid retrieval strategy with reranking to ensure accurate and relevant definition retrieval. Experiments on miniF2F, ProofNet, and our newly proposed AdvancedMath benchmark show that CRAMF can be seamlessly integrated into LLM-based autoformalizers, yielding consistent improvements in translation accuracy, achieving up to 62.1% and an average of 29.9% relative improvement.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 9

GETMusic: Generating Any Music Tracks with a Unified Representation and Diffusion Framework

Symbolic music generation aims to create musical notes, which can help users compose music, such as generating target instrumental tracks from scratch, or based on user-provided source tracks. Considering the diverse and flexible combination between source and target tracks, a unified model capable of generating any arbitrary tracks is of crucial necessity. Previous works fail to address this need due to inherent constraints in music representations and model architectures. To address this need, we propose a unified representation and diffusion framework named GETMusic (`GET' stands for GEnerate music Tracks), which includes a novel music representation named GETScore, and a diffusion model named GETDiff. GETScore represents notes as tokens and organizes them in a 2D structure, with tracks stacked vertically and progressing horizontally over time. During training, tracks are randomly selected as either the target or source. In the forward process, target tracks are corrupted by masking their tokens, while source tracks remain as ground truth. In the denoising process, GETDiff learns to predict the masked target tokens, conditioning on the source tracks. With separate tracks in GETScore and the non-autoregressive behavior of the model, GETMusic can explicitly control the generation of any target tracks from scratch or conditioning on source tracks. We conduct experiments on music generation involving six instrumental tracks, resulting in a total of 665 combinations. GETMusic provides high-quality results across diverse combinations and surpasses prior works proposed for some specific combinations.

  • 7 authors
·
May 18, 2023 2

Qwen2.5-Math Technical Report: Toward Mathematical Expert Model via Self-Improvement

In this report, we present a series of math-specific large language models: Qwen2.5-Math and Qwen2.5-Math-Instruct-1.5B/7B/72B. The core innovation of the Qwen2.5 series lies in integrating the philosophy of self-improvement throughout the entire pipeline, from pre-training and post-training to inference: (1) During the pre-training phase, Qwen2-Math-Instruct is utilized to generate large-scale, high-quality mathematical data. (2) In the post-training phase, we develop a reward model (RM) by conducting massive sampling from Qwen2-Math-Instruct. This RM is then applied to the iterative evolution of data in supervised fine-tuning (SFT). With a stronger SFT model, it's possible to iteratively train and update the RM, which in turn guides the next round of SFT data iteration. On the final SFT model, we employ the ultimate RM for reinforcement learning, resulting in the Qwen2.5-Math-Instruct. (3) Furthermore, during the inference stage, the RM is used to guide sampling, optimizing the model's performance. Qwen2.5-Math-Instruct supports both Chinese and English, and possess advanced mathematical reasoning capabilities, including Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR). We evaluate our models on 10 mathematics datasets in both English and Chinese, such as GSM8K, MATH, GaoKao, AMC23, and AIME24, covering a range of difficulties from grade school level to math competition problems.

  • 16 authors
·
Sep 18, 2024

Evaluating and Improving Tool-Augmented Computation-Intensive Math Reasoning

Chain-of-thought prompting~(CoT) and tool augmentation have been validated in recent work as effective practices for improving large language models~(LLMs) to perform step-by-step reasoning on complex math-related tasks. However, most existing math reasoning datasets may be not able to fully evaluate and analyze the ability of LLMs in manipulating tools and performing reasoning, as they may only require very few invocations of tools or miss annotations for evaluating intermediate reasoning steps. To address the issue, we construct CARP, a new Chinese dataset consisting of 4,886 computation-intensive algebra problems with formulated annotations on intermediate steps. In CARP, we test four LLMs with CoT prompting, and find that they are all prone to make mistakes at the early steps of the solution, leading to wrong answers. Based on this finding, we propose a new approach that can deliberate the reasoning steps with tool interfaces, namely DELI. In DELI, we first initialize a step-by-step solution based on retrieved exemplars, then iterate two deliberation procedures that check and refine the intermediate steps of the generated solution, from the perspectives of tool manipulation and natural language reasoning, until obtaining converged solutions or reaching the maximum turn. Experimental results on CARP and six other datasets show that the proposed DELI mostly outperforms competitive baselines, and can further boost the performance of existing CoT methods. Our data and code are available in https://github.com/RUCAIBox/CARP.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 4, 2023

Proof2Hybrid: Automatic Mathematical Benchmark Synthesis for Proof-Centric Problems

Evaluating the mathematical capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a critical yet challenging frontier. Existing benchmarks fall short, particularly for proof-centric problems, as manual creation is unscalable and costly, leaving the true mathematical abilities of LLMs largely unassessed. To overcome these barriers, we propose Proof2Hybrid, the first fully automated framework that synthesizes high-quality, proof-centric benchmarks from natural language mathematical corpora. The key novelty of our solution is Proof2X, a roadmap of converting mathematical proofs into various kinds of questions that are easy to verify. Instructed by this roadmap, we propose a new type of hybrid-formatted questions, named ``m-out-of-n multiple judge questions'', specifically designed to enable robust, automatic evaluation while being resilient to guessing and superficial pattern matching inherent in traditional formats. As a demonstration of our framework, we introduce AlgGeoTest, a benchmark for algebraic geometry--a frontier domain of modern mathematics--comprising 456 challenging items. Our extensive evaluations on state-of-the-art LLMs using AlgGeoTest reveal profound deficits in their comprehension of algebraic geometry, providing a more precise measure of their true mathematical capabilities. Our framework and benchmark pave the way for a new wave of in-depth research into the mathematical intelligence of AI systems.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 4

Automating Human Tutor-Style Programming Feedback: Leveraging GPT-4 Tutor Model for Hint Generation and GPT-3.5 Student Model for Hint Validation

Generative AI and large language models hold great promise in enhancing programming education by automatically generating individualized feedback for students. We investigate the role of generative AI models in providing human tutor-style programming hints to help students resolve errors in their buggy programs. Recent works have benchmarked state-of-the-art models for various feedback generation scenarios; however, their overall quality is still inferior to human tutors and not yet ready for real-world deployment. In this paper, we seek to push the limits of generative AI models toward providing high-quality programming hints and develop a novel technique, GPT4Hints-GPT3.5Val. As a first step, our technique leverages GPT-4 as a ``tutor'' model to generate hints -- it boosts the generative quality by using symbolic information of failing test cases and fixes in prompts. As a next step, our technique leverages GPT-3.5, a weaker model, as a ``student'' model to further validate the hint quality -- it performs an automatic quality validation by simulating the potential utility of providing this feedback. We show the efficacy of our technique via extensive evaluation using three real-world datasets of Python programs covering a variety of concepts ranging from basic algorithms to regular expressions and data analysis using pandas library.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 5, 2023

LINC: A Neurosymbolic Approach for Logical Reasoning by Combining Language Models with First-Order Logic Provers

Logical reasoning, i.e., deductively inferring the truth value of a conclusion from a set of premises, is an important task for artificial intelligence with wide potential impacts on science, mathematics, and society. While many prompting-based strategies have been proposed to enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to do such reasoning more effectively, they still appear unsatisfactory, often failing in subtle and unpredictable ways. In this work, we investigate the validity of instead reformulating such tasks as modular neurosymbolic programming, which we call LINC: Logical Inference via Neurosymbolic Computation. In LINC, the LLM acts as a semantic parser, translating premises and conclusions from natural language to expressions in first-order logic. These expressions are then offloaded to an external theorem prover, which symbolically performs deductive inference. Leveraging this approach, we observe significant performance gains on FOLIO and a balanced subset of ProofWriter for three different models in nearly all experimental conditions we evaluate. On ProofWriter, augmenting the comparatively small open-source StarCoder+ (15.5B parameters) with LINC even outperforms GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting by an absolute 38% and 10%, respectively. When used with GPT-4, LINC scores 26% higher than CoT on ProofWriter while performing comparatively on FOLIO. Further analysis reveals that although both methods on average succeed roughly equally often on this dataset, they exhibit distinct and complementary failure modes. We thus provide promising evidence for how logical reasoning over natural language can be tackled through jointly leveraging LLMs alongside symbolic provers. All corresponding code is publicly available at https://github.com/benlipkin/linc

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 23, 2023

Training and Evaluating Language Models with Template-based Data Generation

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3, PaLM, and Llama has significantly transformed natural language processing, showcasing remarkable capabilities in understanding and generating language. However, these models often struggle with tasks requiring complex reasoning, particularly in mathematical problem-solving, due in part to the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality, domain-specific datasets necessary for training sophisticated reasoning abilities. To address this limitation, we introduce Template-based Data Generation (TDG), a novel approach that leverages LLMs (GPT-4) to automatically generate parameterized meta-templates, which are then used to synthesize a vast array of high-quality problems and solutions. Leveraging TDG, we create TemplateMath Part I: TemplateGSM, a dataset comprising over 7 million synthetically generated grade school math problems--each accompanied by code-based and natural language solutions--with the potential to generate an effectively unlimited number more. This dataset alleviates the scarcity of large-scale mathematical datasets and serves as a valuable resource for pre-training, fine-tuning, and evaluating LLMs in mathematical reasoning. Our method not only enables the generation of virtually infinite data but also elevates data augmentation to a new level by using GPT-4 for meta-template generation, ensuring diverse and high-quality problem structures. The TemplateMath Part I: TemplateGSM dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/math-ai/TemplateGSM. The code is available at https://github.com/iiis-ai/TemplateMath.

  • 1 authors
·
Nov 27, 2024 3

MathBridge: A Large-Scale Dataset for Translating Mathematical Expressions into Formula Images

Understanding sentences that contain mathematical expressions in text form poses significant challenges. To address this, the importance of converting these expressions into formula images has been highlighted. For instance, the expression ``x equals minus b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus four a c, all over two a'' is more readily comprehensible when displayed as an image x = -b pm sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}{2a}. To develop a text-to-image conversion system, we can break down the process into text-to-LaTeX and LaTeX-to-image conversions, with the latter being managed with by existing various LaTeX engines. However, the former approach has been notably hindered by the severe scarcity of text-to-LaTeX paired data, presenting a significant challenge in the field.In this context, we introduce MathBridge, the first extensive dataset for translating mathematical spoken English into LaTeX, which aims to establish a robust baseline for future research in text-to-LaTeX translation. MathBridge comprises approximately 23 million LaTeX formulas paired with corresponding spoken English expressions. Through comprehensive evaluations, including fine-tuning and testing with data, we discovered that MathBridge significantly enhances pre-trained language models' capabilities for text-to-LaTeX translation. Specifically, for the T5-large model, the sacreBLEU score increased from 4.77 to 46.8, demonstrating substantial enhancement. Our findings indicate the necessity for a new metric specifically for text-to-LaTeX conversion evaluation.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 7, 2024

MUSTARD: Mastering Uniform Synthesis of Theorem and Proof Data

Recent large language models (LLMs) have witnessed significant advancement in various tasks, including mathematical reasoning and theorem proving. As these two tasks require strict and formal multi-step inference, they are appealing domains for exploring the reasoning ability of LLMs but still face important challenges. Previous studies such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) have revealed the effectiveness of intermediate steps guidance. However, such step-wise annotation requires heavy labor, leading to insufficient training steps for current benchmarks. To fill this gap, this work introduces MUSTARD, a data generation framework that masters uniform synthesis of theorem and proof data of high quality and diversity. MUSTARD synthesizes data in three stages: (1) It samples a few mathematical concept seeds as the problem category. (2) Then, it prompts a generative language model with the sampled concepts to obtain both the problems and their step-wise formal solutions. (3) Lastly, the framework utilizes a proof assistant (e.g., Lean Prover) to filter the valid proofs. With the proposed MUSTARD, we present a theorem-and-proof benchmark MUSTARDSAUCE with 5,866 valid data points. Each data point contains an informal statement, an informal proof, and a translated formal proof that passes the prover validation. We perform extensive analysis and demonstrate that MUSTARD generates validated high-quality step-by-step data. We further apply the MUSTARDSAUCE for fine-tuning smaller language models. The fine-tuned Llama 2-7B achieves a 15.41% average relative performance gain in automated theorem proving, and 8.18% in math word problems. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/Eleanor-H/MUSTARD.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 14, 2024

JiuZhang3.0: Efficiently Improving Mathematical Reasoning by Training Small Data Synthesis Models

Mathematical reasoning is an important capability of large language models~(LLMs) for real-world applications. To enhance this capability, existing work either collects large-scale math-related texts for pre-training, or relies on stronger LLMs (\eg GPT-4) to synthesize massive math problems. Both types of work generally lead to large costs in training or synthesis. To reduce the cost, based on open-source available texts, we propose an efficient way that trains a small LLM for math problem synthesis, to efficiently generate sufficient high-quality pre-training data. To achieve it, we create a dataset using GPT-4 to distill its data synthesis capability into the small LLM. Concretely, we craft a set of prompts based on human education stages to guide GPT-4, to synthesize problems covering diverse math knowledge and difficulty levels. Besides, we adopt the gradient-based influence estimation method to select the most valuable math-related texts. The both are fed into GPT-4 for creating the knowledge distillation dataset to train the small LLM. We leverage it to synthesize 6 million math problems for pre-training our JiuZhang3.0 model, which only needs to invoke GPT-4 API 9.3k times and pre-train on 4.6B data. Experimental results have shown that JiuZhang3.0 achieves state-of-the-art performance on several mathematical reasoning datasets, under both natural language reasoning and tool manipulation settings. Our code and data will be publicly released in https://github.com/RUCAIBox/JiuZhang3.0.

  • 9 authors
·
May 23, 2024

DynaMath: A Dynamic Visual Benchmark for Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning Robustness of Vision Language Models

The rapid advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown great potential in tackling mathematical reasoning tasks that involve visual context. Unlike humans who can reliably apply solution steps to similar problems with minor modifications, we found that SOTA VLMs like GPT-4o can consistently fail in these scenarios, revealing limitations in their mathematical reasoning capabilities. In this paper, we investigate the mathematical reasoning robustness in VLMs and evaluate how well these models perform under different variants of the same question, such as changes in visual numerical values or function graphs. While several vision-based math benchmarks have been developed to assess VLMs' problem-solving capabilities, these benchmarks contain only static sets of problems and cannot easily evaluate mathematical reasoning robustness. To fill this gap, we introduce DynaMath, a dynamic visual math benchmark designed for in-depth assessment of VLMs. DynaMath includes 501 high-quality, multi-topic seed questions, each represented as a Python program. Those programs are carefully designed and annotated to enable the automatic generation of a much larger set of concrete questions, including many different types of visual and textual variations. DynaMath allows us to evaluate the generalization ability of VLMs, by assessing their performance under varying input conditions of a seed question. We evaluated 14 SOTA VLMs with 5,010 generated concrete questions. Our results show that the worst-case model accuracy, defined as the percentage of correctly answered seed questions in all 10 variants, is significantly lower than the average-case accuracy. Our analysis emphasizes the need to study the robustness of VLMs' reasoning abilities, and DynaMath provides valuable insights to guide the development of more reliable models for mathematical reasoning.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 29, 2024 5