VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Thomas Zhu
dblp:160/2283
· DBLP profile ↗
2ranked-venue papers
1as first author
2since 2021 · last 2026
—ORCID · unresolved
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 since 2021Theory of computation · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | LeanArchitect: Automating Blueprint Generation for Humans and AIabstractLarge-scale formalization projects in Lean rely on blueprints: structured dependency graphs linking informal mathematical exposition to formal declarations. While blueprints are central to human collaboration, existing tooling treats the informal (LaTeX) and formal (Lean) components as largely decoupled artifacts, leading to maintenance overhead and limiting integration with AI automation. We present LeanArchitect, a Lean package for extracting, managing, and exporting blueprint data directly from Lean code. LeanArchitect introduces a declarative annotation mechanism that associates formal declarations with blueprint metadata, automatically infers dependency information, and generates LaTeX blueprint content synchronized with the Lean development. This design eliminates duplication between formal and informal representations and eases fine-grained progress tracking for both human contributors and AI-based theorem provers. We demonstrate the practicality of LeanArchitect through the automated conversion of several large existing blueprint-driven projects, and through a human-AI collaboration case study formalizing a multivariate Taylor theorem. Our results show that LeanArchitect improves maintainability, exposes latent inconsistencies in existing blueprints, and provides an effective interface for integrating AI tools into real-world formalization workflows. Thomas Zhu, Pietro Monticone, Sean Welleck, Jeremy Avigad |
ITP | 1 |
| 2025 | miniCTX: Neural Theorem Proving with (Long-)ContextsabstractReal-world formal theorem proving often depends on a wealth of context, including definitions, lemmas, comments, file structure, and other information. We introduce $\texttt{miniCTX}$, which tests a model's ability to prove formal mathematical theorems that depend on new context that is not seen during training. $\texttt{miniCTX}$ contains theorems sourced from real Lean projects and textbooks, each associated with a context that can span tens of thousands of tokens. Models are tasked with proving a theorem given access to code from the theorem's repository, which contains context that is needed for the proof. As a baseline for $\texttt{miniCTX}$, we tested fine-tuning and prompting methods that condition theorem proving on preceding context. Both approaches substantially outperform traditional methods that rely solely on state information. We found that this ability to use context is not captured by previous benchmarks such as $\texttt{miniF2F}$. Alongside $\texttt{miniCTX}$, we offer $\texttt{ntp-toolkit}$ for automatically extracting and annotating theorem proving data, making it easy to add new projects into $\texttt{miniCTX}$ to ensure that contexts are not seen during training. $\texttt{miniCTX}$ offers a challenging and realistic evaluation of neural theorem provers. Jiewen Hu, Thomas Zhu, Sean Welleck |
ICLR | 2 |