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Published as a conference paper at NeurIPS 2026

LeanSearch v2: Global Premise Retrieval for Lean 4 Theorem Proving

Guoxiong Gao, Zeming Sun, Jiedong Jiang, Yutong Wang, jd xu, Peihao Wu, Bryan Dai, Bin Dong

Abstract

Proving theorems in Lean 4 often requires identifying a scattered set of library lemmas whose joint use enables a concise proof—a task we call global premise retrieval . Existing tools address adjacent problems: semantic search engines find individual declarations matching a query, while premise-selection systems predict useful lemmas one tactic step at a time. Neither recovers the full premise set an entire theorem requires. We present LeanSearch v2, a two-mode retrieval system for this task. Its standard mode applies a hierarchy-informalized Mathlib corpus with an embedding–reranker pipeline, achieving state-of-the-art single-query retrieval without domain-specific fine-tuning (nDCG@10 of 0.62 vs. 0.53 for the next-best system). Its reasoning mode builds on standard mode as its retrieval substrate, targeting global premise retrieval through iterative sketch-retrieve-reflect cycles. On a 69-query benchmark of research-level Mathlib theorems, reasoning mode recovers 46.1% of ground-truth premise groups within 10 retrieved candidates, outperforming strong reasoning retrieval systems (38.0%) and premise-selection baselines (9.3%) on the same benchmark. In a controlled downstream evaluation with a fixed prover loop, replacing alternative retrievers with LeanSearch v2 yields the highest proof success (20% vs. 16% for the next-best system and 4% without retrieval), confirming that retrieval quality propagates to proof generation. All code, data, and benchmarks will be open-sourced.

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