Characterizing initial human-AI proof formalization workflows

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 2 Jun 2026] Characterizing initial human-AI proof formalization workflows Katherine M. Collins, Simon Frieder, Jonas Bayer, Jacob Loader, Jeck Lim, Peiyang Song, Fabian Zaiser, Lexin Zhou, Shanda Li, Sam Looi, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Umang Bhatt, Adrian Weller, Jose Hernandez-Orallo, Cameron E. Freer, Valerie Chen, Ilia Sucholutsky For centuries, human mathematicians have written proofs to substantiate their mathematical arguments; yet, the ability to automatically verify the validity of proofs has long been a challenge. Advances in AI systems' ability to generate code and engage in increasingly high-level mathematical reasoning promise to transform people's ability to formalize and thereby verify proofs. While many works focus on benchmarking the current frontier, we instead study how people use these tools. We conduct a mixed-methods analysis into the initial impact of AI on people's formalization workflows: what people claim they want, what they see as the barriers to those visions, and how they actually use and adapt AI in practice. A qualitative survey shows that people's preferences are diverse, but with a general desire for AI assistance in formalization that preserves high-level human control over the proof discovery process. To assess how people actually engage with AI for formalization under such limitations, we conduct a controlled user study in which participants formalize informal math problems and their proofs, with and without AI, across a range of mathematical problems at varying levels of difficulty and domains. Despite limitations of the tools at the time for autoformalization, participants tend to attain higher formalization accuracy when allowed access to AI tools than when formalizing on their own, with most participants flexibly choosing to use multiple different AI tools. Taken together, our work sheds light on the early stages of AI integration into formalization workflows, involving an intimate interplay of human and AI engagement. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2606.04273 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2606.04273v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.04273 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Katherine Collins [view email] [v1] Tue, 2 Jun 2026 22:58:19 UTC (2,738 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)