LeanSearch v2: Global Premise Retrieval for Lean 4 Theorem Proving

TL;DR

LeanSearch v2 is a dual-mode retrieval system that significantly improves premise retrieval for Lean 4 theorem proving, enabling more effective proof automation and outperforming existing tools.

Contribution

It introduces a novel two-mode retrieval system with state-of-the-art single-query and global premise retrieval capabilities, open-sourced for the first time.

Findings

State-of-the-art single-query retrieval (nDCG@10 of 0.62)

Global premise retrieval recovers 46.1% of ground-truth premise groups

Improves proof success rate to 20% in downstream evaluation.

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. We have open-sourced all code, data, and benchmarks. Code and data: https://github.com/frenzymath/LeanSearch-v2 . The standard mode is publicly available with API access at https://leansearch.net/ .