Formally Verified AI Co-Reasoning: An Education Case Study

Arnav Mehta, Chenjun Guo, Thomas Lu, Niels Voss, Manooshree Patel, Rayna Bhattacharyya, Peter Donovan, Gireeja Ranade


Abstract
Proof assistants such as Lean 4 offer machine-checkable verification of mathematical reasoning, but their adoption is limited because formal languages have a steep learning curve and can be challenging to use. Large language models offer a way to lower this barrier to entry through natural-language co-reasoning systems: proof assistants that users interact with entirely in natural language, and which use formal verification to provide feedback to users who submit incomplete and incorrect proofs. This paper explores such a co-reasoning system in an educational setting.

We explore metrics for three properties that are important for natural language co-reasoning systems—faithfulness, accuracy and appropriate granularity. We introduce an evaluation framework for these properties in the context of educational proofs. Second, we present a case study on an educational natural-language co-reasoning system for math proofs, evaluating its autoformalization harness on student-written proofs from an undergraduate linear algebra class using these three properties.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.977
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:
20651–20668
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.977/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Arnav Mehta, Chenjun Guo, Thomas Lu, Niels Voss, Manooshree Patel, Rayna Bhattacharyya, Peter Donovan, and Gireeja Ranade. 2026. Formally Verified AI Co-Reasoning: An Education Case Study. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 20651–20668, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Formally Verified AI Co-Reasoning: An Education Case Study (Mehta et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.977.pdf