arXiv:2602.10512cs.LGcs.LO2026-02被引 1

层次化证明器比扁平化结构少需指数级样本,因可复用推理块。

Exponential Sample Complexity Separation between Flat and Hierarchical Agentic Theorem Provers

  • 用分层结构重用子证明,避免重复训练相同难点。
  • 在教师证明路径分布下,层次化学习所需样本量呈指数级更少。
  • 适合研究高效自动定理证明与可复用推理结构的学者。

代理式定理证明器常在返回策略级搜索前引入中间引理、证明草图或子目标分解。这看似代价高昂:若证明引理本身困难,为何让学习型证明器投入于此?我们从统计学习角度给出答案。不关注所有公式的最坏情况证明复杂度,而是研究由教师证明器生成的有偏数据分布:初始定理状态及其成功验证的证明轨迹。将证明搜索建模为确定性有限时域马尔可夫决策过程(MDP),分析从这些轨迹中进行离线模仿学习。成功边界取决于教师证明的平均长度、教师下一步动作的可预测性,以及学生对局部预测问题的学习精度。扁平化学生从完全展开的轨迹中学习,导致重复子证明在训练和测试时多次出现;而分层学生则预测可复用的证明有向无环图(DAG),每个共享块仅解决一次。当展开会将同一困难局部论证重复指数次时,我们的边界表明分层学习者的充分样本量可指数级低于扁平学习者。这揭示了可复用证明结构如何在基于验证器的定理证明中提供具体的统计优势。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Agentic theorem provers often introduce intermediate lemmas, proof sketches, or subgoal decompositions before returning to tactic-level search. This can look like an expensive detour: if proving lemmas is itself hard, why should a learned prover spend effort there? We give a statistical learning answer. Instead of worst-case proof complexity over all formulas, we study the biased data distribution produced by a teacher prover: initial theorem states together with successful verified proof traces. We model proof search as a deterministic finite-horizon MDP and analyze offline imitation learning from those traces. The success bounds depend on the average length of teacher proofs, how predictable the teacher's next action is, and how accurately the student learns that local prediction problem. A flat student learns from fully inlined traces, so repeated subproofs appear many times in its training and test-time certificate. A hierarchical student instead predicts a reusable proof DAG and solves each shared block once. When flattening duplicates the same hard local argument exponentially many times, the sufficient-sample certificate produced by our bounds can be exponentially smaller for the hierarchical learner. This gives a concrete statistical mechanism by which reusable proof structure helps verifier-based theorem proving.

定理证明分层结构样本效率

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