Large Lemma Miners: Can LLMs Do Induction Proofs for Hardware?

Large Lemma Miners: Can LLMs Do Induction Proofs for Hardware?

Romy Peled, Daniel Kroening, Michael Tautschnig, Yakir Vizel

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3988-3998. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/444

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential for solving mathematical tasks. We show that LLMs can be utilized to generate proofs by induction for hardware verification and thereby replace some of the manual work %alleviating some of the manual effort done by Formal Verification engineers and deliver value to industry. We present a neurosymbolic approach that includes two prompting frameworks to generate candidate invariants, which are checked using a formal symbolic tool. Our results indicate that with sufficient reprompting, LLMs are able to generate inductive arguments for mid-size open-source RTL designs. For 90% of our problem set, at least one of the prompt setups succeeded in producing a provably correct inductive argument.
Keywords:
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Automated reasoning and theorem proving
Natural Language Processing: Applications
Natural Language Processing: Language models