English

Clarifying Before Reasoning: A Coq Prover with Structural Context

Artificial Intelligence 2025-07-04 v1

Abstract

In this work, we investigate whether improving task clarity can enhance reasoning ability of large language models, focusing on theorem proving in Coq. We introduce a concept-level metric to evaluate task clarity and show that adding structured semantic context to the standard input used by modern LLMs, leads to a 1.85×\times improvement in clarity score (44.5\%~\rightarrow~82.3\%). Using the general-purpose model \texttt{DeepSeek-V3}, our approach leads to a 2.1×\times improvement in proof success (21.8\%~\rightarrow~45.8\%) and outperforms the previous state-of-the-art \texttt{Graph2Tac} (33.2\%). We evaluate this on 1,386 theorems randomly sampled from 15 standard Coq packages, following the same evaluation protocol as \texttt{Graph2Tac}. Furthermore, fine-tuning smaller models on our structured data can achieve even higher performance (48.6\%). Our method uses selective concept unfolding to enrich task descriptions, and employs a Planner--Executor architecture. These findings highlight the value of structured task representations in bridging the gap between understanding and reasoning.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.02541,
  title  = {Clarifying Before Reasoning: A Coq Prover with Structural Context},
  author = {Yanzhen Lu and Hanbin Yang and Xiaodie Wang and Ge Zhang and Biao Li and Chenxu Fu and Chao Li and Yang Yuan and Andrew Chi-Chih Yao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.02541},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:44:46.845Z