ReuF2F: Benchmarking Coding Agents on Formalized Undergraduate Research Problems

Abstract

As AI systems begin to resolve open research problems, reliable verification becomes increasingly important. Formal mathematics provides a trusted framework for mathematical reasoning, enabling agents to produce machine-checkable proofs while conducting mathematical exploration. Existing formal mathematics benchmarks often focus on known results or a small set of prominent open problems, which can become difficult to evaluate reliably once solutions are discovered and widely disseminated. Existing evaluation protocols are also not always aligned with how modern coding agents operate. We therefore introduce ReuF2F, a Lean 4 benchmark of 244 formalized open problems drawn from Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU), spanning entry-level open research problems across a broad range of mathematical subfields. We expect these less prominent open problems, which tend to attract less attention and may remain unsolved for longer, to be better suited for held-out evaluation of end-to-end open problem resolution in Lean. We adopt a standard coding-agent evaluation setting, placing each problem and its logical negation into a Lean project in a Docker container. We also build Leanimum-agent on mini-SWE-agent to provide a unified harness for fair comparisons across models. Our evaluation finds that even the best-performing model resolves only ~40% of the problems, leaving substantial room for improvement on formalized open research problems.