IMProofBench: Benchmarking AI on Research-Level Mathematical Proof Generation
This addresses the need for better evaluation of AI mathematical reasoning for researchers and developers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing benchmark concepts with a more realistic setup.
The authors tackled the lack of benchmarks for evaluating AI on research-level mathematical proofs by introducing IMProofBench, a private benchmark of 39 peer-reviewed problems requiring detailed proofs, where GPT-5 achieved fully correct solutions for 22% of problems and Grok-4 reached 52% accuracy on final-answer subproblems.
As the mathematical capabilities of large language models (LLMs) improve, it becomes increasingly important to evaluate their performance on research-level tasks at the frontier of mathematical knowledge. However, existing benchmarks are limited, as they focus solely on final-answer questions or high-school competition problems. To address this gap, we introduce IMProofBench, a private benchmark consisting of 39 peer-reviewed problems developed by expert mathematicians. Each problem requires a detailed proof and is paired with subproblems that have final answers, supporting both an evaluation of mathematical reasoning capabilities by human experts and a large-scale quantitative analysis through automated grading. Furthermore, unlike prior benchmarks, the evaluation setup simulates a realistic research environment: models operate in an agentic framework with tools like web search for literature review and mathematical software such as SageMath. Our results show that current LLMs can succeed at the more accessible research-level questions, but still encounter significant difficulties on more challenging problems. Quantitatively, Grok-4 achieves the highest accuracy of 52% on final-answer subproblems, while GPT-5 obtains the best performance for proof generation, achieving a fully correct solution for 22% of problems. IMProofBench will continue to evolve as a dynamic benchmark in collaboration with the mathematical community, ensuring its relevance for evaluating the next generation of LLMs.