Self-Supervised Theorem Discovery in a Formal Axiomatic System

Abstract

Recent artificial intelligence (AI) systems have shown remarkable progress in mathematical reasoning. Many existing approaches, including large language models (LLMs), draw on human prior knowledge in the form of mathematical text, code, or theorem libraries. Although these approaches are highly effective in practice, it remains an open question whether an agent can autonomously discover useful theorems without such human priors. We study this question in a formal axiomatic system by developing an agent that starts from axioms and inference rules alone and gradually grows a library of useful theorems. Concretely, we propose a self-supervised theorem-discovery algorithm that alternates between proof search and useful-theorem extraction, building a theorem library whose entries are reused as lemmas for subsequent proof search. Experiments show that the agent discovers tens of thousands of theorems and finds proofs for human-written benchmark problems, suggesting that its discoveries include theorems meaningful from a human mathematical perspective. Furthermore, the discovered theorems improve LLM proof performance when provided as prompt lemmas, indicating that they can serve as external knowledge for LLM reasoning. Our results provide evidence that useful theorems can emerge from proof search without relying on human-provided theorem libraries. More broadly, they suggest a path toward self-evolving AI systems for mathematics whose discoveries remain formally verifiable.