Proof-Refactor: Refactoring Generated Formal Proofs into Modular Artifacts (arxiv.org)
arXiv:2606.03743v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in generating formal proofs, their outputs often remain less readable, modular, maintainable, and reusable than proofs in mature formal mathematics libraries. We argue that this gap stems in part from the compile-first objective implicit in most proof-generation pipelines, which encourages monolithic or ad hoc proof scripts rather than library-quality artifacts. Existing approaches to proof-quality improvement often rely on explicit, computable optimization objectives. In practice, however, the most tractable and experimentally validated objectives are largely length-based, while higher-level qualities such as readability, modularity, maintainability, and reusability are difficult to reduce to reliable automatic metrics. Instead of optimizing proof improvement against a single proxy metric, we take a process-guided approach inspired by human proof-refactoring workflows. We propose an agentic framework $\textbf{Proof-Refactor}$ that decomposes proof refactoring into four phases: extracting candidate proof fragments, designing helper declarations, formally proving the extracted and designed components, and repairing the original proof using the verified components. On generated Lean proofs from PutnamBench and Putnam2025, Proof-Refactor improves rubric-based refactoring scores over a strong Claude Code refactoring baseline, with the largest gains in signature quality and human readability. These results suggest that process-guided refactoring can improve proof structure without treating proof length as the primary objective.
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in generating formal proofs, their outputs often remain less readable, modular, maintainable, and reusable than proofs in mature formal mathematics libraries. We argue that this gap stems in part from the compile-first objective implicit in most proof-generation pipelines, which encourages monolithic or ad hoc proof scripts rather than library-quality artifacts. Existing approaches to proof-quality improvement often rely on explicit, computable optimization objectives. In practice, however, the most tractable and experimentally validated objectives are largely length-based, while higher-level qualities such as readability, modularity, maintainability, and reusability are difficult to reduce to reliable automatic metrics. Instead of optimizing proof improvement against a single proxy metric, we take a process-guided approach inspired by human proof-refactoring workflows. We propose an agentic framework $\textbf{Proof-Refactor}$ that decomposes proof refactoring into four phases: extracting candidate proof fragments, designing helper declarations, formally proving the extracted and designed components, and repairing the original proof using the verified components. On generated Lean proofs from PutnamBench and Putnam2025, Proof-Refactor improves rubric-based refactoring scores over a strong Claude Code refactoring baseline, with the largest gains in signature quality and human readability. These results suggest that process-guided refactoring can improve proof structure without treating proof length as the primary objective.
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