mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Sequent-Prover: Training Agents for Formal, Checkable SMT-based Reasoning

arXiv 2610.15258 ↗First posted 11 Oct 2026cs.CL cs.AI cs.LGcited by 0

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Educational agents and math problem solving also fits: General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks

Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce Sequent-Prover, a family of verifier-using language-model agents, and the post-training framework that produces them. Agents reason in an executable SMT-LIB scratchpad: they write complete SMT-LIB programs, query Z3 across turns, inspect solver feedback, repair formalizations, and terminate with an explicit answer. Our recipe, verifier-conditioned trajectory distillation, bootstraps from a noisy teacher proposal policy by sampling multi-turn trajectories, retaining the successful tail that is correct, non-trivial, grounded, and executable, then applying supervised fine-tuning and trajectory-level preference optimization. Because solver success alone does not guarantee semantic faithfulness, we evaluate task accuracy, k-sample reliability, and SMT program quality. Across 37 benchmarks and 7,254 problems per model family, post-training raises the 4B model's per-attempt accuracy from 85.6% to 97.0% and four-sample all-correct reliability (pass^4}) from 64.1% to 91.7%. It also reduces average SMT calls from 4.10 to 2.52 and tokens per attempt from 18.97k to 12.72k. Sequent-Prover agents give answers backed by executable formal artifacts.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Educational agents and math problem solving, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 42 of its 65 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2026.

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42 of 65 references.

References · 42

  1. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  2. 2020Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understandingcited by 7,963
  3. 2018Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challengecited by 4,886
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  6. 2016SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Textcited by 4,148
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30 more
  1. 2018CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledgecited by 1,822
  2. 2025Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Perspectivecited by 1,345
  3. 2023Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think: Unfaithful Explanations in Chain-of-Thought Promptingcited by 1,122
  4. 2023Teaching Large Language Models to Self-Debugcited by 988
  5. 2019DROP: A Reading Comprehension Benchmark Requiring Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphscited by 903
  6. 2021Are NLP Models really able to Solve Simple Math Word Problems?cited by 878
  7. 2021Did Aristotle Use a Laptop? A Question Answering Benchmark with Implicit Reasoning Strategiescited by 743
  8. 2023AGIEval: A Human-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Modelscited by 716
  9. 2017Program Induction by Rationale Generation : Learning to Solve and Explain Algebraic Word Problemscited by 650
  10. 2023Logic-LM: Empowering Large Language Models with Symbolic Solvers for Faithful Logical Reasoningcited by 391
  11. 2016Solving General Arithmetic Word Problemscited by 360
  12. 2022Language Models Are Greedy Reasoners: A Systematic Formal Analysis of Chain-of-Thoughtcited by 337
  13. 2020ProofWriter: Generating Implications, Proofs, and Abductive Statements over Natural Languagecited by 324
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  20. 2025ZebraLogic: On the Scaling Limits of LLMs for Logical Reasoningcited by 201
  21. 2023Is Self-Repair a Silver Bullet for Code Generation?cited by 197
  22. 2023LINC: A Neurosymbolic Approach for Logical Reasoning by Combining Language Models with First-Order Logic Proverscited by 168
  23. 2023SatLM: Satisfiability-Aided Language Models Using Declarative Promptingcited by 102
  24. 2021SpartQA: : A Textual Question Answering Benchmark for Spatial Reasoningcited by 77
  25. 2022StepGame: A New Benchmark for Robust Multi-Hop Spatial Reasoning in Textscited by 68
  26. 2024DafnyBench: A Benchmark for Formal Software Verificationcited by 57
  27. 2024Proof of Thought : Neurosymbolic Program Synthesis allows Robust and Interpretable Reasoningcited by 19
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  30. 2025Grammars of Formal Uncertainty: When to Trust LLMs in Automated Reasoning Taskscited by 10

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