Cost-Efficient Theorem Proving via Agent Orchestration in Program Verification
Shuangjie Yao, Nikolaus Holzer, Mark Paul Santolucito, Baishakhi Ray, Suman Jana, Dongdong She
cs.AI
Oct 7, 2026 · v1
cs.LO cs.PL cs.SE
TL;DR
Builds an LLM agent-orchestration prover that constructs Lean 4 proofs for program verification, evaluated on five Lean 4 benchmarks.
Abstract
Program verification establishes software correctness through machine-checkable proofs constructed in theorem provers. It's a guarantee especially valuable for code generated by large language models (LLMs), which is fluent but carries no assurance of correctness. Almost all existing provers, however, pursue pass rates alone at whatever sampling or search budget it takes, and overlook the success-vs-cost frontier; yet real software often carries hundreds of interdependent proof obligations, so what matters at scale is not whether one theorem can be proved, but how many can be proved economically. We introduce CoCo-Prover, which formalizes cost-efficient program proving as metalevel decision-making under cost, grounded on two-level proof graphs: an AND/OR proof hypergraph within each declaration is joined to a lemma-dependency graph across declarations; and at each step, it answers two questions: which open goals to select, and which actions to purchase on these goals. Selection stays symbolic as a topological pass over the proof graphs. Action choice is agent orchestration via metalevel decision-making: an agentic router treats every bounded specialist invocation as a separately priced, best-effort computation, matching heterogeneous specialist agents together with configurations, under evolved routing rules as evidence accumulates. On five program verification benchmarks in Lean 4 including function-level CLEVER, VERINA, and AlgoVeri, and repository-level NTP4VC and Vero, we show that CoCo-Prover achieves a better success-vs-cost frontier than baselines including frontier coding agents and state-of-the-art LLM-based provers: it achieves the best solve rate on every benchmark and up to 100% on two benchmarks. It also reduces cost by up to 30.9% compared to the strongest baseline with the strongest LLM in our evaluation.
Problem
LLM-based provers usually maximize pass rates without regard to cost. Real software verification involves hundreds of interdependent proof obligations, so the number of proofs obtainable economically is what matters.
Approach
CoCo-Prover casts cost-efficient program proving as metalevel decision-making under cost, using a two-level proof graph: an AND/OR hypergraph within each declaration and a lemma-dependency DAG across declarations. A symbolic scheduler picks dependency-ready goals. An agentic router selects which priced specialist agent and configuration to invoke, refining its routing rules as evidence accumulates. Lean 4 is the sole proof authority, and an Aesop-based automation component is included.
Results
On CLEVER, VERINA, AlgoVeri, NTP4VC and Vero, CoCo-Prover achieves the best solve rate in every setting across three LLM backbones, reaching 100% on CLEVER and VERINA. It reduces cost on commonly solved problems by up to 30.9% versus the strongest baseline, Humanize.
| Method | CLEVER | VERINA | AlgoVeri |
|---|
| Ax-Prover-Base | 89.4% | 85.7% | 81.8% |
| Humanize | 97.5% | 98.9% | 85.7% |
| Coding Agent | 91.9% | 87.3% | 67.5% |
| CoCo-Prover | 100% | 100% | 89.6% |
Solve rate on function-level benchmarks (GPT-5.6-Terra backbone)