Person. Talia Ringer
PhD advisorDan Grossman
UndergraduateUniversity of Maryland, College Park
Papers
Cobblestone: A Divide-and-Conquer Approach for Automating Formal Verification kasibatla-2026-cobblestone
Mathematicians put AI model AlphaProof to the test ringer-2025-mathematicians
Proof Repair across Quotient Type Equivalences viola-2025-proof
Proofs in proof assistants like Rocq can be brittle, breaking easily in response to changes. To address this, recent work introduced an algorithm and tool in Rocq to automatically repair broken proofs in response to changes that correspond to type equivalences. However, many changes remained out of the scope of this algorithm and tool—especially changes in underlying behavior . We extend this proof repair algorithm so that it can express certain changes in behavior that were previously out of scope. We focus in particular on equivalences between quotient types —types equipped with a relation that describes what it means for any two elements of that type to be equal. Quotient type equivalences can be used to express interesting changes in representations of mathematical structures, as well as changes in the implementations of data structures. We extend this algorithm and tool to support quotient type equivalences in Rocq. Notably, since Rocq lacks quotient types entirely, our extensions use Rocq’s setoid machinery in place of quotients. Specifically, (1) our extension to the algorithm supports new changes corresponding to setoids, and (2) our extension to the tool supports this new class of changes and further automates away some of the new proof obligations. We demonstrate our extensions on proof repair case studies for previously unsupported changes. We also perform manual proof repair in Cubical Agda, a language with a univalent metatheory, which allows us to construct the first ever internal proofs of correctness for proof repair.
HybridProver: Augmenting Theorem Proving with LLM-Driven Proof Synthesis and Refinement hu-2025-hybridprover
Formal methods play a crucial role in ensuring the reliability of critical systems through rigorous mathematical verification. However, their adoption remains limited due to the labor-intensive nature of manual proof construction. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened new opportunities for automated theorem proving. Two main paradigms have emerged: stepwise tactic-based generation and whole-proof synthesis. While both approaches have complementary strengths, existing work largely treats them in isolation. In this work, we propose HybridProver, a unified framework that integrates whole-proof synthesis and tactic-based generation through proof sketches as an intermediate representation. This design enables the reuse of partially correct proof structures while effectively combining high-level planning with fine-grained reasoning. We implement HybridProver in Isabelle/HOL and post-train two 7B-scale LLMs on our optimized Isabelle datasets. Experiments on the miniF2F Isabelle benchmark achieved a 73.8% success rate and improved upon the previous state of the art (61.9%), demonstrating that lightweight models, when combined with our approach, can effectively generate Isabelle/HOL proofs without relying on very large LLMs. Ablation studies further analyze the impact of dataset quality, training configurations, and sampling strategies on proof generation.
QEDCartographer: Automating Formal Verification Using Reward-Free Reinforcement Learning sanchezstern-2025-qedcartographer
Stop treating ‘AGI’ as the north-star goal of AI research blilihamelin-2025-stop
The AI research community plays a vital role in shaping the scientific, engineering, and societal goals of AI research. In this position paper, we argue that focusing on the highly contested topic of ‘artificial general intelligence’ (‘AGI’) undermines our ability to choose effective goals. We identify six key traps – obstacles to productive goal setting – that are aggravated by AGI discourse: Illusion of Consensus, Supercharging Bad Science, Presuming Value-Neutrality, Goal Lottery, Generality Debt, and Normalized Exclusion. To avoid these traps, we argue that the AI research community needs to (1) prioritize specificity in engineering and societal goals, (2) center pluralism about multiple worthwhile approaches to multiple valuable goals, and (3) foster innovation through greater inclusion of disciplines and communities. Therefore, the AI research community needs to stop treating ‘AGI’ as the north-star goal of AI research.
Proofs and Conversations ringer-2024-proofs
Correctly Compiling Proofs About Programs Without Proving Compilers Correct seo-2024-correctly
Guaranteeing correct compilation is nearly synonymous with compiler verification. However, the correctness guarantees for certified compilers and translation validation can be stronger than we need. While many compilers do have incorrect behavior, even when a compiler bug occurs it may not change the program’s behavior meaningfully with respect to its specification. Many real-world specifications are necessarily partial in that they do not completely specify all of a program’s behavior. While compiler verification and formal methods have had great success for safety-critical systems, there are magnitudes more code, such as math libraries, compiled with incorrect compilers, that would benefit from a guarantee of its partial specification. This paper explores a technique to get guarantees about compiled programs even in the presence of an unverified, or even incorrect, compiler. Our workflow compiles programs, specifications, and proof objects, from an embedded source language and logic to an embedded target language and logic. We implement two simple imperative languages, each with its own Hoare-style program logic, and a system for instantiating proof compilers out of compilers between these two languages that fulfill certain equational conditions in Coq. We instantiate our system on four compilers: one that is incomplete, two that are incorrect, and one that is correct but unverified. We use these instances to compile Hoare proofs for several programs, and we are able to leverage compiled proofs to assist in proofs of larger programs. Our proof compiler system is formally proven sound in Coq. We demonstrate how our approach enables strong target program guarantees even in the presence of incorrect compilation, opening up new options for which proof burdens one might shoulder instead of, or in addition to, compiler correctness.
Baldur: Whole-Proof Generation and Repair with Large Language Models first-2023-baldur
Passport: Improving Automated Formal Verification Using Identifiers sanchezstern-2023-passport
Formally verifying system properties is one of the most effective ways of improving system quality, but its high manual effort requirements often render it prohibitively expensive. Tools that automate formal verification by learning from proof corpora to synthesize proofs have just begun to show their promise. These tools are effective because of the richness of the data the proof corpora contain. This richness comes from the stylistic conventions followed by communities of proof developers, together with the powerful logical systems beneath proof assistants. However, this richness remains underexploited, with most work thus far focusing on architecture rather than on how to make the most of the proof data. This article systematically explores how to most effectively exploit one aspect of that proof data: identifiers. We develop the Passport approach, a method for enriching the predictive Coq model used by an existing proof-synthesis tool with three new encoding mechanisms for identifiers: category vocabulary indexing, subword sequence modeling, and path elaboration. We evaluate our approach’s enrichment effect on three existing base tools: ASTactic, Tac, and Tok. In head-to-head comparisons, Passport automatically proves 29% more theorems than the best-performing of these base tools. Combining the three tools enhanced by the Passport approach automatically proves 38% more theorems than combining the three base tools. Finally, together, these base tools and their enhanced versions prove 45% more theorems than the combined base tools. Overall, our findings suggest that modeling identifiers can play a significant role in improving proof synthesis, leading to higher-quality software.
PRoofster: Automated Formal Verification agrawal-2023-proofster
Getting More out of Large Language Models for Proofs zhang-2023-getting
Large language models have the potential to simplify formal theorem proving and make it more accessible. But how to get the most out of these models is still an open question. To answer this question, we take a step back and explore the failure cases of these models using common prompting-based techniques. Our talk will discuss these failure cases and what they can teach us about how to get more out of these models.
Long-Term Mentoring for Computer Science Researchers ruppel-2023-long
Proof Repair Infrastructure for Supervised Models: Building a Large Proof Repair Dataset reichel-2023-proof
We report on our efforts building a new, large proof-repair dataset and benchmark suite for the Coq proof assistant. The dataset is made up of Git commits from open-source projects with old and new versions of definitions and proofs aligned across commits. Building this dataset has been a significant undertaking, highlighting a number of challenges and gaps in existing infrastructure. We discuss these challenges and gaps, and we provide recommendations for how the proof assistant community can address them. Our hope is to make it easier to build datasets and benchmark suites so that machine-learning tools for proofs will move to target the tasks that matter most and do so equitably across proof assistants.
Proof repair across type equivalences ringer-2021-proof
REPLica: REPL instrumentation for Coq analysis ringer-2020-replica
QED at Large: A Survey of Engineering of Formally Verified Software ringer-2019-qed
Development of formal proofs of correctness of programs can increase actual and perceived reliability and facilitate better understanding of program specifications and their underlying assumptions. Tools supporting such development have been available for over 40 years, but have only recently seen wide practical use. Projects based on construction of machine-checked formal proofs are now reaching an unprecedented scale, comparable to large software projects, which leads to new challenges in proof development and maintenance. Despite its increasing importance, the field of proof engineering is seldom considered in its own right; related theories, techniques, and tools span many fields and venues. This survey of the literature presents a holistic understanding of proof engineering for program correctness, covering impact in practice, foundations, proof automation, proof organization, and practical proof development.
Ornaments for Proof Reuse in Coq ringer-2019-ornaments
Ornaments express relations between inductive types with the same inductive structure. We implement fully automatic proof reuse for a particular class of ornaments in a Coq plugin, and show how such a tool can give programmers the rewards of using indexed inductive types while automating away many of the costs. The plugin works directly on Coq code; it is the first ornamentation tool for a non-embedded dependently typed language. It is also the first tool to automatically identify ornaments: To lift a function or proof, the user must provide only the source type, the destination type, and the source function or proof. In taking advantage of the mathematical properties of ornaments, our approach produces faster functions and smaller terms than a more general approach to proof reuse in Coq.