{"slug": "veritas-verifier-guided-proof-search-for-zero-shot-formal-theorem-proving", "title": "VERITAS: Verifier-Guided Proof Search for Zero-Shot Formal Theorem Proving", "summary": "Researchers introduced VERITAS, a zero-shot framework for formal theorem proving that leverages rich verifier signals through a two-phase protocol combining Best-of-N sampling and critic-guided Monte Carlo tree search. VERITAS achieved 40.6% on the miniF2F benchmark, outperforming baseline methods, and 7.3% on a new combinatorics benchmark, demonstrating the value of feedback-driven exploration in proof search.", "body_md": "arXiv:2606.19399v1 Announce Type: new\nAbstract: LLM-based formal provers often collapse rich verifier signals (syntax errors, type mismatches, partial goal progress) into a binary pass/fail bit. We present VERITAS, a zero-shot framework that routes every verifier signal back into proof search through a two-phase protocol: Best-of-N sampling first, then a critic-guided MCTS pass that ingests Phase 1 failures as explicit negative examples. The protocol preserves every theorem solved by its own Phase 1 sweep, so Phase 2's additional solves are attributable to feedback-driven exploration. VERITAS reaches 40.6% on miniF2F (vs. an independently run Best-of-5 at 36.9%, Portfolio 26.2%) and 7.3% on VERITAS-CombiBench, a 55-theorem combinatorics benchmark we release on which Best-of-5 (1.8%) falls below Portfolio (3.6%), exposing that unguided sampling hurts when correct lemma names must be recovered iteratively from verifier feedback. Artifacts are available on GitHub.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/veritas-verifier-guided-proof-search-for-zero-shot-formal-theorem-proving", "canonical_source": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19399", "published_at": "2026-06-19 04:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-19 04:09:15.753746+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "machine-learning", "ai-research"], "entities": ["VERITAS", "miniF2F", "VERITAS-CombiBench", "GitHub", "arXiv"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/veritas-verifier-guided-proof-search-for-zero-shot-formal-theorem-proving", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/veritas-verifier-guided-proof-search-for-zero-shot-formal-theorem-proving.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/veritas-verifier-guided-proof-search-for-zero-shot-formal-theorem-proving.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/veritas-verifier-guided-proof-search-for-zero-shot-formal-theorem-proving.jsonld"}}