FormalMATH: Benchmarking Formal Mathematical Reasoning of Large Language
  Models
Authors: name: Zhouliang Yu; name: Ruotian Peng; name: Keyi Ding; name: Yizhe Li; name: Zhongyuan Peng; name: Minghao Liu; name: Yifan Zhang; name: Zheng Yuan; name: Huajian Xin; name: Wenhao Huang; name: Yandong Wen; name: Ge Zhang; name: Weiyang Liu
Published: 2025-05-05 15:37:00

Abstract: Formal mathematical reasoning remains a critical challenge for artificial
intelligence, hindered by limitations of existing benchmarks in scope and
scale. To address this, we present FormalMATH, a large-scale Lean4 benchmark
comprising 5,560 formally verified problems spanning from high-school Olympiad
challenges to undergraduate-level theorems across diverse domains (e.g.,
algebra, applied mathematics, calculus, number theory, and discrete
mathematics). To mitigate the inefficiency of manual formalization, we
introduce a novel human-in-the-loop autoformalization pipeline that integrates:
(1) specialized large language models (LLMs) for statement autoformalization,
(2) multi-LLM semantic verification, and (3) negation-based disproof filtering
strategies using off-the-shelf LLM-based provers. This approach reduces expert
annotation costs by retaining 72.09% of statements before manual verification
while ensuring fidelity to the original natural-language problems. Our
evaluation of state-of-the-art LLM-based theorem provers reveals significant
limitations: even the strongest models achieve only 16.46% success rate under
practical sampling budgets, exhibiting pronounced domain bias (e.g., excelling
in algebra but failing in calculus) and over-reliance on simplified automation
tactics. Notably, we identify a counterintuitive inverse relationship between
natural-language solution guidance and proof success in chain-of-thought
reasoning scenarios, suggesting that human-written informal reasoning
introduces noise rather than clarity in the formal reasoning settings. We
believe that FormalMATH provides a robust benchmark for benchmarking formal
mathematical reasoning.