Zachary Burton

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Zachary Burton

I am a research engineer at Pramaana Labs, building the verification layer for high-stakes AI. Previously, I was a machine learning engineer at Meta working on Facebook Reels ranking. I graduated from MIT, Course 18 (Mathematics), in February 2026. I love music; singing, DJing, theory, as well as reading about sociology, technology, politics, and more!

My research investigates what LLMs can and can't do in mathematics, and uses those findings to push them toward mathematical superintelligence. Recent work includes diagnosing inference-time mode collapse in RL-trained Lean theorem provers (ICML 2026 AI4Math Workshop), PhD-level expert evaluation for QEDBench at ICML 2026, a pre-registered study of whether visual-reasoning post-training transfers to math, and RLHF infrastructure for interactive policy personalization (PIEFACE).

I was born in NYC and raised in the UK, and am based in Brooklyn. Feel free to reach out if you want to chat!

Inference-Time Diversity in RL-Trained Lean Theorem Provers: A Diagnostic Study
ICML 2026 AI4Math Workshop (Poster), First Author
arXiv / pdf / poster / code

RL-trained Lean provers mode-collapse at inference time: on miniF2F-test, doubling DeepSeek-Prover-V1.5-RL's sampling budget from k=32 to k=64 solves zero additional theorems. A fixed schedule of 15 tactic skeletons breaks the plateau (+12.3 ± 4.2 theorems across 3 seeds), and a controlled ablation shows the gain comes from tactic structure, not prompt diversity.

QEDBench: Quantifying the Alignment Gap in Automated Evaluation of University-Level Mathematical Proofs
ICML 2026 Main Conference (Poster), Coauthor
poster

Multi-institution benchmark measuring alignment between LLM judges and human experts on university-level mathematical proofs. PhD-level expert evaluator (probability, discrete mathematics, algorithms).

Negative Transfer is the Default: Visual Reasoning to Math on Qwen2.5-VL-7B
Research study, 2026

A pre-registered test of whether post-training on abstract visual reasoning (Raven's matrices) improves math. Eight matched-eval SFT and GRPO conditions were all negative on MATH-500 (base 66.8% → 44.0–61.6%); the damage traces to completion compression rather than format failure. Extended to from-scratch 162M pretraining, where a 1% formal-language (Dyck) warm-up cut tokens-to-threshold on compositional algebra by 12.3% against a scrambled control (3/3 seeds).

RL Failure When Does Tabular RL Actually Break?
Blog Post, 2025
post

A systematic study of representation bottlenecks in symbolic algebra, testing where RL breaks on high school math.

Collision Collision Thresholds on Lattices
Preprint
arXiv

An expository derivation using Poissonization and Laplace asymptotics to analyze random walks on lattices.

Service

Reviewer, ICML AI4Math Workshop (2025, 2026)

Bellman

Ingests a Python codebase, proposes what must be true for it to be correct, translates functions into Lean 4 models, differentially tests each model against the real code, and proves or refutes the claims with the Lean kernel. Screens out sorry, vacuous hypotheses, and unreachable counterexamples, and reports the full trust chain behind every finding.

PIEFACE PIEFACE
website

Live RLHF platform for interactive policy personalization on an RL agent over motion-planning gadget structures. Flask + SQLAlchemy backend serving Maskable PPO models with top-K action inference over a 217-dim action space, custom PyTorch reward model trained on per-action accept/reject feedback, Cytoscape.js trace visualization frontend.

zOS demo zOS
github

Local LLM self-training loop with step-by-step feedback, written with Rust & Tauri.

Baller
play

A browser-based football career sim: start as a 10-year-old academy trialist and play through scholarships, contracts, transfers, and internationals. In-match decisions feed a deterministic, seeded match engine.

Formal Complexity Science

Autoformalization of classical NP-completeness reductions in Lean 4, built on Mathlib and CSLib. Formalizes Karp reductions (SAT ≤ 3SAT ≤ 3-COLORING, with more planned) as machine-checked proofs.

LLM Political Persuasion?
paper

17.279 (Political Misinformation in the Age of Social Media) Final Paper - independent empirical study (n=174, randomized) on AI disclosure effects on belief formation in political conspiracy-framing content.

Scribe Scribe AI
devpost

Autocomplete for math handwriting.

Tonbridge Talk Being Black at Tonbridge
Talk at Tonbridge School, 2021
video

A reflection on my experience navigating race at a UK boarding school.

N-Word Talk Why White People Shouldn't Say the N-Word
Talk at Tonbridge School, 2022
video

Isn't it obvious?

Gauss Law Magnetic Gauss Law
video

A physics microlecture on electromagnetism.

Website Template