ProofWatch: Watchlist Guidance for Large Theories in E

Watchlist (also hint list) is a mechanism that allows related proofs to guide a proof search for a new conjecture. This mechanism has been used with the Otter and Prover9 theorem provers, both for interactive formalizations and for human-assisted proving of open conjectures in small theories. In this work we explore the use of watchlists in large theories coming from first-order translations of large ITP libraries, aiming at improving hammer-style automation by smarter internal guidance of the ATP systems. In particular, we (i) design watchlist-based clause evaluation heuristics inside the E ATP system, and (ii) develop new proof guiding algorithms that load many previous proofs inside the ATP and focus the proof search using a dynamically updated notion of proof matching. The methods are evaluated on a large set of problems coming from the Mizar library, showing significant improvement of E's standard portfolio of strategies, and also of the previous best set of strategies invented for Mizar by evolutionary methods.Comment: 19 pages, 10 tables, submitted to ITP 2018 at FLO

A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach to First-Order Logic Theorem Proving

Automated theorem provers have traditionally relied on manually tuned heuristics to guide how they perform proof search. Deep reinforcement learning has been proposed as a way to obviate the need for such heuristics, however, its deployment in automated theorem proving remains a challenge. In this paper we introduce TRAIL, a system that applies deep reinforcement learning to saturation-based theorem proving. TRAIL leverages (a) a novel neural representation of the state of a theorem prover and (b) a novel characterization of the inference selection process in terms of an attention-based action policy. We show through systematic analysis that these mechanisms allow TRAIL to significantly outperform previous reinforcement-learning-based theorem provers on two benchmark datasets for first-order logic automated theorem proving (proving around 15% more theorems)

An efficient contradiction separation based automated deduction algorithm for enhancing reasoning capability

Automated theorem prover (ATP) for first-order logic (FOL), as a significant inference engine, is one of the hot research areas in the field of knowledge representation and automated reasoning. E prover, as one of the leading ATPs, has made a significant contribution to the development of theorem provers for FOL, particularly equality handling, after more than two decades of development. However, there are still a large number of problems in the TPTP problem library, the benchmark problem library for ATPs, that E has yet to solve. The standard contradiction separation (S-CS) rule is an inference method introduced recently that can handle multiple clauses in a synergized way and has a few distinctive features which complements to the calculus of E. Binary clauses, on the other hand, are widely utilized in the automated deduction process for FOL because they have a minimal number of literals (typically only two literals), few symbols, and high manipulability. As a result, it is feasible to improve a prover's deduction capability by reusing binary clause. In this paper, a binary clause reusing algorithm based on the S-CS rule is firstly proposed, which is then incorporated into E with the objective to enhance E’s performance, resulting in an extended E prover. According to experimental findings, the performance of the extended E prover not only outperforms E itself in a variety of aspects, but also solves 18 problems with rating of 1 in the TPTP library, meaning that none of the existing ATPs are able to resolve them

A verified prover based on ordered resolution

International audienceThe superposition calculus, which underlies first-order theorem provers such as E, SPASS, and Vampire, combines ordered resolution and equality reasoning. As a step towards verifying modern provers, we specify, using Isabelle/HOL, a purely functional first-order ordered resolution prover and establish its soundness and refutational completeness. Methodologically, we apply stepwise refinement to obtain, from an abstract nondeterministic specification, a verified de-terministic program, written in a subset of Isabelle/HOL from which we extract purely functional Standard ML code that constitutes a semidecision procedure for first-order logic

Automated Deduction – CADE 28

This open access book constitutes the proceeding of the 28th International Conference on Automated Deduction, CADE 28, held virtually in July 2021. The 29 full papers and 7 system descriptions presented together with 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 76 submissions. CADE is the major forum for the presentation of research in all aspects of automated deduction, including foundations, applications, implementations, and practical experience. The papers are organized in the following topics: Logical foundations; theory and principles; implementation and application; ATP and AI; and system descriptions