Abstract
Mathematical reasoning systems should be consistent when the same concept is expressed in equivalent forms. This requires not only recognizing shared mathematical meaning but also identifying the representation changes and reconstructing a traceable route between forms. We study this problem through mathematical theorems, whose equivalent formulations preserve the same underlying result while differing substantially in representation. In this setting, theorem recognition is only the first step: a robust system must also identify the intervening transformations and recover their order. We introduce an evaluation of robust procedural mathematical reasoning with three components: theorem identification, transformation identification, and ordered reconstruction. Using validated theorem-representation pairs from an existing corpus, we build a procedural-robustness dataset with typed operations, reference procedures, and matched contrasts that distinguish valid reformulations from invalid ones. We first measure closed-book performance of four open-weight models to establish a baseline, then evaluate retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) as support mechanism for the same task. Models identify theorem identity more reliably than they recover the transformations and ordered routes connecting equivalent representations. RAG improves every stage, but procedural reconstruction remains the main bottleneck. The framework supports more consistent and traceable mathematical systems, with potential applications in mathematical search, tutoring, autoformalization, and scientific discovery.
Cite this work
Fateme Mazdarani and Carlos Toxtli-Hernández. 2026. From Recognition to Reconstruction: Towards Robust Procedural Mathematical Reasoning. Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Mathematical Natural Language Processing (MathNLP 2026).
@inproceedings{Mazdarani2026Recognition,
title = {From Recognition to Reconstruction: Towards Robust Procedural Mathematical Reasoning},
author = {Mazdarani, Fateme and Toxtli, Carlos},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Mathematical Natural Language Processing (MathNLP 2026)},
address = {Budapest, Hungary},
publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
year = {2026},
month = October,
note = {Forthcoming},
url = {https://sites.google.com/view/mathnlp2026}
}Related
