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arXiv · 2606.14688

Flood and Harvest: The Provable Necessity of Trivia for Generating Valuable Mathematics via the Lens of Language Generation in the Limit

Xiaoyu Li·Andi Han·Dai Shi·Zheng Gao·Jiaojiao Jiang·Junbin Gao
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Abstract

AI systems coupled to proof assistants now generate formal mathematics at scale, and the gap between what a checker can verify and what a mathematician would value has become the binding constraint. We model the generation of valuable mathematics as nested language generation in the limit: a verifiable formal language $F$, accessed through a membership oracle (the proof checker), contains an unknown valuable language $H \in \mathcal{H}$ revealed only through an adversarial enumeration of a core $C \subseteq H$ of exact density $α$ (the literature). Every output is valuable ($\in H$), trivial ($\in F \setminus H$), or a hallucination ($\notin F$). We settle four questions. First, the verifier is not taste: the collections admitting generation with breadth are exactly those of the oracle-free model, characterized fiber-wise by Angluin's condition. Second, the verifier does buy sound coverage, covering all unseen valuable statements while asserting only valid ones: possible with it, impossible without it; it relocates unavoidable errors from false to trivial. Third, and centrally, a sharp dichotomy on the tight family: generators emitting finitely many trivia achieve optimal coverage $α/2$, while any infinite trivia allowance, even at vanishing rate, jumps the optimum to $1-α/2$ (both tight, for cores presented as the candidate intersection), and one generator attains both ends. The transition is in trivia count, not rate; the gap $1-α$ is the unrecorded mass. Fourth, both regimes instantiate in a compression model of mathematics. A perfect verifier cannot substitute for taste: the unbounded stream of correct-but-worthless statements is not an engineering accident but a provable necessity, since covering unrecorded valuable mathematics requires an infinite, but asymptotically negligible, stream of certified trivia.

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Xiaoyu Li, Andi Han, Dai Shi, Zheng Gao, Jiaojiao Jiang, Junbin Gao. 2026-06-12. Flood and Harvest: The Provable Necessity of Trivia for Generating Valuable Mathematics via the Lens of Language Generation in the Limit. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14688

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