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

arXiv:2610.15258 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.LO · Submitted 2026-10-11 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.LO

Submitted: 2026-10-11

Updated: 2026-10-11

Code: https://github.com/DebarghaG/proofofthought

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: We introduce Sequent-Prover, a family of verifier-using language-model agents, and the post-training framework that produces them.

Abstract

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.

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