🏆 Seed Prover 1.5: ByteDance’s AI Math Prover Dominates Olympiads with Formal Proof Mastery

The quest for AI that truly "proves" math — not just guesses answers — just got a massive upgrade, and ByteDance is swinging for the fences.

Seed Prover 1.5 isn't a minor tweak; it's a full-throttle evolution built on large-scale agentic RL, turning the model into a relentless proof-hunting machine that learns from experience like a grad student on steroids. Dropped today amid the holiday buzz, this beast directly addresses the bottlenecks of its predecessor: slower search, higher compute hunger, and occasional dead ends in deep reasoning chains. The result? Efficiency gains that make IMO gold feel routine.

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🚀 The Breakthroughs That Rewrite the Math AI Rules

Seed Prover 1.5 redefines what AI can achieve in formal mathematics, with four core innovations that eliminate past limitations:

1. Agentic RL MasteryTrained on vast trajectories of proof attempts, rewarding only Lean-verified successes — no fluffy natural language fluff, just cold, hard formal correctness. It learns from failed attempts like a mathematician, refining strategies instead of repeating mistakes.
2. Efficient Test-Time Scaling (TTS)Smarter search pruning and iterative reflection slash runtime dramatically: what took the previous version's "Heavy" mode days now wraps in hours with lighter computational resources. No more waiting weeks for complex proofs.
3. Whole-Proof + Lemma StrategyGenerates complete, Lean-compilable proofs with reusable lemmas, self-summarizing failures to bounce back stronger. This mimics how elite mathematicians tackle monster problems — breaking them into smaller, solvable pieces and building on past insights.
4. Geometry Boost IntegrationInherits Seed-Geometry's specialized spatial reasoning capabilities, eliminating weak spots across algebra, combinatorics, number theory, and geometry. No more uneven performance across math disciplines.

💡 Key Differentiator: Unlike generic LLMs that "hallucinate" proofs, Seed Prover 1.5 only outputs formally verified, Lean-compilable results — every step checks out mathematically.

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📊 Mind-Blowing Benchmarks: Gold Medal-Level Performance

The numbers speak for themselves — Seed Prover 1.5 isn't just beating benchmarks; it's dominating them at Olympiad and graduate levels:

Benchmark	Seed Prover 1.5 Performance	Key Takeaway
IMO 2025	16.5 hours for full proofs on P1-P5 → 35/42 points (gold medal threshold under old scoring)	Outperforms previous version with far less compute; solves problems in hours that once took days.
Putnam 2025	9 hours to nail 11/12 problems — proofs thousands of lines long, all Lean-compilable and human-verifiable	Nearly perfect score on one of the hardest math competitions in the world.
Historical Putnam Set	88% accuracy (new SOTA)	Dominates decades of past Putnam problems, setting a new standard for math AI.
Master's-Level Fate-H	80% accuracy	Handles graduate-level math with ease, outpacing all existing models.
PhD-Tier Fate-X	33% accuracy	Makes inroads into the most complex, research-level math problems.

Early leaks reveal proofs that diverge elegantly from human solutions — including novel combinatorial insights on IMO 2025 Problem 5 — proving the model isn't just memorizing, it's innovating new mathematical approaches.

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🖥️ Interface & Accessibility: From Research to Real-World Use

While the core model is research-grade (the GitHub repo is already flooded with Lean-verified proofs), ByteDance is planning broader accessibility:

• Upcoming API Rollout: A public API will let users input theorems and receive certified, explainable proofs — with step-by-step traces for debugging or teaching.
• Lean Integration: Full compatibility with the Lean theorem prover ensures every proof is machine-verifiable and human-readable.
• Open Technical Report: The detailed research paper is public, inviting mathematicians and AI researchers to dissect the agentic RL architecture.

Note: Seed Prover 1.5 remains closed-source (classic ByteDance strategy), but the team has shared proof datasets and evaluation metrics to enable independent verification.

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🌍 The Bigger Picture: AI as a Mathematical Collaborator

Seed Prover 1.5 isn't just beating other math AIs — it's closing the gap to human mathematical frontiers:

• Outguns Competitors: Outperforms DeepSeek's Prover-V2 and InternLM's StepProver in efficiency and accuracy; unlike OpenAI's o1-series, it delivers formal, verifiable proofs with no guesswork.
• Targeted RL + Formal Verification: Proves that this combo is the "killer app" for math AI, potentially accelerating research in cryptography, software verification, and pure mathematics.
• Real-World Impact: Could revolutionize fields like quantum computing, where formal proof is critical for verifying complex algorithms, and education, where it can act as a 24/7 math tutor that generates rigorous proofs.

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🌟 Final Verdict: A New Era of AI Math Mastery

Seed Prover 1.5 isn't chasing hype — it's delivering verifiable mastery, turning the dream of AI as a mathematical collaborator into reality. As the API launches and RL scales further, expect a cascade of breakthroughs: faster progress in pure math, safer software systems, and a new generation of AI tools that don't just compute answers — they prove them, relentlessly and correctly.

ByteDance just raised the bar to gold medal height; the rest of the field better start training harder.

📌 Official Links

• Technical Report & Proofs: https://github.com/ByteDance-Seed/Seed-Prover/tree/main/SeedProver-1.5
• Seed Team Research Hub: https://seed.bytedance.com/en/research
• Upcoming API Waitlist: https://seed.bytedance.com/en/ (check for updates)

#ByteDanceAI #SeedProver #MathAI #FormalVerification #IMO2025