Papers › Learning to Reason in Large Theories without Imitation

Learning to Reason in Large Theories without Imitation

25 May 2019arXiv:1905.10501archive 2025-07-28

Kshitij Bansal, Christian Szegedy, Markus N. Rabe, Sarah M. Loos, Viktor Toman

In this paper, we demonstrate how to do automated theorem proving in the presence of a large knowledge base of potential premises without learning from human proofs. We suggest an exploration mechanism that mixes in additional premises selected by a tf-idf (term frequency-inverse document frequency) based lookup in a deep reinforcement learning scenario. This helps with exploring and learning which premises are relevant for proving a new theorem. Our experiments show that the theorem prover trained with this exploration mechanism outperforms provers that are trained only on human proofs. It approaches the performance of a prover trained by a combination of imitation and reinforcement learning. We perform multiple experiments to understand the importance of the underlying assumptions that make our exploration approach work, thus explaining our design choices.

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Tasks

Automated Theorem ProvingDeep Reinforcement LearningImitation LearningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)reinforcement-learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Automated Theorem Proving HOList benchmark BoW2 (extra -ves) Percentage correct 36.55 #3 of 4 Archive leaderboard report

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