Faithful Autoformalization via Roundtrip Verification and Repair

Daneshvar Amrollahi, Jerry Lopez, Clark Barrett


Abstract
When an LLM formalizes natural language, how do we know the output is faithful? We propose a roundtrip verification approach which does not require ground-truth annotations: formalize a statement, translate the result back to natural language, re-formalize, and use a formal tool to check logical equivalence. When the two formalizations agree, this provides evidence of a faithful formalization. When they disagree, a stage-level diagnosis localizes the error to a specific translation step, and a scoped repair operator attempts to correct that step. We evaluate the framework on two statutory domains (the Texas Transportation Code and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Code) using two LLMs (Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.2) with three repair baselines. Diagnosis-guided scoped repair is the most effective method, with effectiveness contingent on the reliability of the diagnosis function. Across both domains and both models, under our full repair system, rules that fail the equivalence check show 1.4x-2.5x more NLI drift than rules that pass it.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.469
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9836–9852
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.469/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Daneshvar Amrollahi, Jerry Lopez, and Clark Barrett. 2026. Faithful Autoformalization via Roundtrip Verification and Repair. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 9836–9852, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Faithful Autoformalization via Roundtrip Verification and Repair (Amrollahi et al., Findings 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.469.pdf