English

Towards Autonomous Mathematics Research

Machine Learning 2026-03-09 v3 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Computers and Society

Abstract

Recent advances in foundational models have yielded reasoning systems capable of achieving a gold-medal standard at the International Mathematical Olympiad. The transition from competition-level problem-solving to professional research, however, requires navigating vast literature and constructing long-horizon proofs. In this work, we introduce Aletheia, a math research agent that iteratively generates, verifies, and revises solutions end-to-end in natural language. Specifically, Aletheia is powered by an advanced version of Gemini Deep Think for challenging reasoning problems, a novel inference-time scaling law that extends beyond Olympiad-level problems, and intensive tool use to navigate the complexities of mathematical research. We demonstrate the capability of Aletheia from Olympiad problems to PhD-level exercises and most notably, through several distinct milestones in AI-assisted mathematics research: (a) a research paper (Feng26) generated by AI without any human intervention in calculating certain structure constants in arithmetic geometry called eigenweights; (b) a research paper (LeeSeo26) demonstrating human-AI collaboration in proving bounds on systems of interacting particles called independent sets; and (c) an extensive semi-autonomous evaluation (Feng et al., 2026a) of 700 open problems on Bloom's Erdos Conjectures database, including autonomous solutions to four open questions. In order to help the public better understand the developments pertaining to AI and mathematics, we suggest quantifying standard levels of autonomy and novelty of AI-assisted results, as well as propose a novel concept of human-AI interaction cards for transparency. We conclude with reflections on human-AI collaboration in mathematics and share all prompts as well as model outputs at https://github.com/google-deepmind/superhuman/tree/main/aletheia.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.10177,
  title  = {Towards Autonomous Mathematics Research},
  author = {Tony Feng and Trieu H. Trinh and Garrett Bingham and Dawsen Hwang and Yuri Chervonyi and Junehyuk Jung and Joonkyung Lee and Carlo Pagano and Sang-hyun Kim and Federico Pasqualotto and Sergei Gukov and Jonathan N. Lee and Junsu Kim and Kaiying Hou and Golnaz Ghiasi and Yi Tay and YaGuang Li and Chenkai Kuang and Yuan Liu and Hanzhao Lin and Evan Zheran Liu and Nigamaa Nayakanti and Xiaomeng Yang and Heng-Tze Cheng and Demis Hassabis and Koray Kavukcuoglu and Quoc V. Le and Thang Luong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.10177},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

42 pages, updated with summary of FirstProof results. Accompanied blog post https://deepmind.google/blog/accelerating-mathematical-and-scientific-discovery-with-gemini-deep-think/

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:30:23.465Z