Papers
arxiv:2602.05216

Semantic Search over 9 Million Mathematical Theorems

Published on Feb 5
· Submitted by
Vasily Ilin
on Feb 6
Authors:
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Abstract

Large-scale semantic theorem retrieval system demonstrates superior performance over existing baselines using a 9.2 million theorem corpus with systematic analysis of representation context, language model choice, and embedding strategies.

AI-generated summary

Searching for mathematical results remains difficult: most existing tools retrieve entire papers, while mathematicians and theorem-proving agents often seek a specific theorem, lemma, or proposition that answers a query. While semantic search has seen rapid progress, its behavior on large, highly technical corpora such as research-level mathematical theorems remains poorly understood. In this work, we introduce and study semantic theorem retrieval at scale over a unified corpus of 9.2 million theorem statements extracted from arXiv and seven other sources, representing the largest publicly available corpus of human-authored, research-level theorems. We represent each theorem with a short natural-language description as a retrieval representation and systematically analyze how representation context, language model choice, embedding model, and prompting strategy affect retrieval quality. On a curated evaluation set of theorem-search queries written by professional mathematicians, our approach substantially improves both theorem-level and paper-level retrieval compared to existing baselines, demonstrating that semantic theorem search is feasible and effective at web scale. The theorem search tool is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/uw-math-ai/theorem-search{this link}, and the dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/uw-math-ai/TheoremSearch{this link}.

Community

Paper submitter

Mathematicians and math prover agents need fast and efficient theorem search. We release Theorem Search over all of arXiv, the Stacks Project, and six other sources. Our search is 2x more accurate than frontier LLMs, with only 4 second latency. Feedback is welcome!

Model Hit@10
Google Search 0.378
Chat-GPT 5.2 0.180
Gemini 3 Pro 0.252
Ours 0.432 / 0.505

Blue: theorem-level results
Red: paper-level results

mts-overview

image

Paper submitter

Mathematicians and math prover agents need fast and efficient theorem search. We release Theorem Search over all of arXiv, the Stacks Project, and six other sources. Our search is 2x more accurate than frontier LLMs, with only 4 second latency. Feedback is welcome!

Model Hit@10
Google Search 0.378
Chat-GPT 5.2 0.180
Gemini 3 Pro 0.252
Ours 0.432 / 0.505

Blue: theorem-level results
Red: paper-level results

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