Predicting the Next State Is Not Enough: JEPA Representations for Lean Theorem Proving
cs.LG
Submitted: 2026-09-26
Updated: 2026-09-26
Comments: Accepted to MathNLP @ EMNLP 2026
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Neural theorem provers must both propose tactics and decide which valid successor states to explore.
Terminology
Abstract
Neural theorem provers must both propose tactics and decide which valid successor states to explore. We study whether one-step Lean transitions provide a self-supervised signal for branch ordering. A JEPA-style model predicts latent successor representations and scores only kernel-validated, nonterminal successors generated by a fixed pretrained ByT5 proposer. JEPA achieves higher Top-1 than matched InfoNCE on a same-theorem ranking diagnostic(50.18% versus 31.55%), but averages 282.3 of 987 solved theorems across three seeds versus 308 for proposer ordering, while requiring more tactic checks. In this setting, accurate one-step transition ranking is therefore insufficient as a long-horizon search value. The controlled evaluation separates representation from proposal quality and treats kernel-checked proof completion as the primary endpoint.
Related papers
- Polynomial-Augmented Neural Networks (PANNs) with Weak Orthogonality Constraints for Enhanced Function and PDE Approximation
- AIRL-S: Unifying Reinforcement Learning and Search-Based Test-Time Scaling via Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning
- Transformers as Bayesian In-Context Experimenters: Smoothness-Adaptive Efficient ATE Estimation
- Convergence issues in Relational Concept Analysis based on AOC-posets
- Beliefs Beyond Posteriors: The Predictive Cost of ELBO Binding
- Understanding Diffusion Models via Ratio-Based Function Approximation with SignReLU Networks