Scaling Natural-Language Graph-Based Test Time Compute for Automated Theorem Proving

Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language processing tasks requiring multi-step logical reasoning capabilities, such as automated theorem proving. However, challenges persist within theorem proving, such as the identification of key mathematical concepts, understanding their interrelationships, and formalizing proofs correctly within natural language. We present KG-prover, a novel framework that leverages knowledge graphs mined from reputable mathematical texts to augment general-purpose LLMs to construct and formalize mathematical proofs. We also study the effects of scaling graph-based, test-time compute using KG-Prover, demonstrating significant performance improvements over baselines across multiple datasets. General-purpose LLMs improve up to 21\% on miniF2F-test when combined with KG-Prover, with consistent improvements ranging from 2-11\% on the ProofNet, miniF2F-test, and MUSTARD datasets. Furthermore, KG-Prover with o4-mini achieves 50\% miniF2F-test. This work provides a promising approach for augmenting natural language proof reasoning with knowledge graphs without the need for additional finetuning.