Just Type It in Isabelle! AI Agents Drafting, Mechanizing, and Generalizing from Human Hints

arXiv cs.AI / 4/20/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper studies how to produce complete and minimal type annotations for rank-one polymorphic lambda-calculus terms as used in Isabelle, ensuring correctness under reparsing and type inference.
  • It provides a metatheoretical treatment with a fully formal specification and proofs, and it also formalizes the development in Isabelle/HOL.
  • The authors run experiments comparing human-driven versus AI-driven formalization workflows, where an LLM-powered agent and a human separately create pen-and-paper proofs.
  • After pen-and-paper stage, the AI agent autoformalizes the results in Isabelle and then uses additional human-hinted AI interventions to refine and generalize the formal development.

Abstract

Type annotations are essential when printing terms in a way that preserves their meaning under reparsing and type inference. We study the problem of complete and minimal type annotations for rank-one polymorphic \lambda-calculus terms, as used in Isabelle. Building on prior work by Smolka, Blanchette et al., we give a metatheoretical account of the problem, with a full formal specification and proofs, and formalize it in Isabelle/HOL. Our development is a series of experiments featuring human-driven and AI-driven formalization workflows: a human and an LLM-powered AI agent independently produce pen-and-paper proofs, and the AI agent autoformalizes both in Isabelle, with further human-hinted AI interventions refining and generalizing the development.