Jasper Dekoninck

PhD candidate at ETH Zurich

I work on mathematical reasoning and language model evaluation in the SRI Lab, supervised by Martin Vechev. Most notably, I lead the MathArena project, a mathematical benchmark that was used by Google, xAI, and Anthropic.

Jasper Dekoninck

Timeline

2023 - present

PhD

Computer Science

ETH Zurich

2026 Training and evaluating theorem provers

My work covered theorem-proving models and their evaluation, together with further development of MathArena.

2nd place, AI4Math @ ICML competition

Second place in one of the four competition tracks at the 2026 AI4Math workshop.

2026

FirstProof, second batch

Our team built an agent for open mathematical problems. It solved 7 of the 10 problems, the best submission in the second batch.

2026

Financial Times interview

I was interviewed about our blog post on K2-Think.

Summer 2026

GResearch, London

Machine learning internship.

2026-present

Treasurer, ETH Chess Club

I manage the club's finances.

2025 MathArena: math competitions and proof evaluation

We used newly released competition problems to evaluate language models with MathArena. I also worked on full-proof evaluation and on routing and cascading between language models.

NeurIPS Top Reviewer Award

Recognized among the top 10% of reviewers at NeurIPS 2025.

2025

AI4Math @ NeurIPS panel

I discussed the future of AI in mathematics alongside Swarat Chaudhuri, Dawn Song, and Chi Jin at the AI4Math workshop in San Diego.

2025

NZZ interview

I was interviewed about our evaluation of language models on the International Mathematical Olympiad.

2025

Nature News interview

I was interviewed about BrokenMath and sycophancy in mathematical proofs generated by language models.

2024 Text generation and benchmark contamination

I worked on methods for controlled text generation and for detecting contamination in language model benchmarks.

Kaggle silver medal, AIMO Progress Prize II

Our team placed 19th out of 2,213 participants.

2024-2026

Rigorous Software Engineering

Exercise teaching assistant for the master's course at ETH Zurich.

2023 PhD in computer science

I began doctoral research at the SRI Lab, ETH Zurich, supervised by Martin Vechev.

Red Teaming Track Winner

US-UK Privacy-Enhancing Technologies Prize Challenge, ETH SRI team

2023-2025

Reliable and Trustworthy AI

Exercise teaching assistant. I also supervised the Software Engineering Seminar in 2023-2024.

2023-2026

President, ETH Chess Club

I organized events and coordinated the board.

2021 - 2023

Master's

Data Science

ETH Zurich

Awarded

ETH-D Scholarship

Full scholarship for master's studies

Awarded

Willi Studer Prize

Best MSc in Data Science

2023 Controlled text generation

My master's thesis studied controlled text generation. I completed the MSc in Data Science at ETH Zurich with an average grade of 6/6.

2022 Research on quantum circuit synthesis

I worked on quantum circuit synthesis as part of my master's studies at ETH Zurich.

2022-2023

Treasurer, ETH Chess Club

I managed the club's finances and helped organize events.

2021 Data science at ETH Zurich

I began the MSc in Data Science at ETH Zurich after completing my bachelor's degrees at KU Leuven.

2021-2022

Student Sustainability Week

Organized events as part of the core team.

2018 - 2021

Bachelor's

Mathematics and Physics

KU Leuven

Awarded

Summa Cum Laude

BSc in Mathematics

Awarded

Summa Cum Laude

BSc in Physics

2021 Degrees in mathematics and physics

I completed bachelor's degrees in both mathematics and physics at KU Leuven.

2020 Science student representation

Alongside my degrees, I served as president of the Overarching Education Council in 2020-2021, representing more than 3,500 science students.

2019 Optimization and financial modelling

At Risk Concile, I worked on portfolio optimization, volatility surface prediction, and financial shock simulations through month-long summer internships in 2019, 2020, and 2021.

2019-2020

Overarching Education Council

Board member representing students in KU Leuven's Faculty of Science.

2019-2020

WINA: freshmen representation and public relations

I handled business relations and organized events for first-year mathematics, physics, and computer science students at KU Leuven.

2018 Studying mathematics and physics

I started a dual bachelor's programmes in mathematics and physics at KU Leuven.

2018-2021

Mathematics student representative

I represented students on the mathematics educational committee.

Publications

2026

2025

AI4Math @ NeurIPS

IMProofBench: Benchmarking AI on Research-Level Mathematical Proof Generation

Johannes Schmitt, Gergely Bérczi, Jasper Dekoninck, Jeremy Feusi, Tim Gehrunger, Raphael Appenzeller, Jim Bryan, Niklas Canova, Timo de Wolff, Filippo Gaia, Michel van Garrel, Baran Hashemi, David Holmes, Aitor Iribar Lopez, Victor Jaeck, Martina Jørgensen, Steven Kelk, Stefan Kuhlmann, Adam Kurpisz, Chiara Meroni, Ingmar Metzler, Martin Möller, Samuel Muñoz-Echániz, Robert Nowak, Georg Oberdieck, Daniel Platt, Dylan Possamaï, Gabriel Ribeiro, Raúl Sánchez Galán, Zheming Sun, Josef Teichmann, Richard P. Thomas, Charles Vial

2024