Kristian Minchev

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2papers
1citation

2 Papers

34.1CLMar 27, 2025
Proof or Bluff? Evaluating LLMs on 2025 USA Math Olympiad

Ivo Petrov, Jasper Dekoninck, Lyuben Baltadzhiev et al.

Recent math benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) such as MathArena indicate that state-of-the-art reasoning models achieve impressive performance on mathematical competitions like AIME, with the leading model, Gemini-2.5-Pro, achieving scores comparable to top human competitors. However, these benchmarks evaluate models solely based on final numerical answers, neglecting rigorous reasoning and proof generation which are essential for real-world mathematical tasks. To address this, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation of full-solution reasoning for challenging mathematical problems. Using expert human annotators, we evaluated several state-of-the-art reasoning models on the six problems from the 2025 USAMO within hours of their release. Our results reveal that all tested models struggled significantly: only Gemini-2.5-Pro achieves a non-trivial score of 25%, while all other models achieve less than 5%. Through detailed analysis of reasoning traces, we identify the most common failure modes and find several unwanted artifacts arising from the optimization strategies employed during model training. Overall, our results suggest that current LLMs are inadequate for rigorous mathematical reasoning tasks, highlighting the need for substantial improvements in reasoning and proof generation capabilities.

22.6CLJun 23, 2025
The Open Proof Corpus: A Large-Scale Study of LLM-Generated Mathematical Proofs

Jasper Dekoninck, Ivo Petrov, Kristian Minchev et al.

In recent months, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in mathematical proof generation, but further advancement is hindered by the lack of a large-scale, high-quality dataset of human-evaluated proofs. While expensive to create, such a dataset is essential for driving improvements in training and enabling a rigorous analysis of proof generation capabilities. In this work, we present the Open Proof Corpus (OPC), a dataset comprising over 5,000 human-evaluated proofs produced by state-of-the-art LLMs. The OPC was specifically designed for broad applicability and downstream usage in proof generation research and is the first to include a substantial number of correct, LLM-generated solutions to problems from prestigious mathematics competitions such as the USAMO and IMO. Using the OPC, we explore critical questions in automated proof generation: (1) the performance gap between natural language and formal proof generation, (2) the discrepancy between final-answer accuracy and full-proof validity, and (3) the impact of best-of-n selection on proof quality. Finally, to showcase the utility of the OPC, we finetune an 8B-parameter model on the dataset, obtaining a model that performs on par with the best model, Gemini-2.5-Pro, on the task of evaluating proof correctness.