TheoremExplainAgent: Towards Video-based Multimodal Explanations for LLM Theorem Understanding

Max Ku, Cheuk Hei Chong, Jonathan Leung, Krish Shah, Alvin Yu, Wenhu Chen


Abstract
Understanding domain-specific theorems often requires more than just text-based reasoning; effective communication through structured visual explanations is crucial for deeper comprehension. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance in text-based theorem reasoning, their ability to generate coherent and pedagogically meaningful visual explanations remains an open challenge. In this work, we introduce TheoremExplainAgent, an agentic approach for generating long-form theorem explanation videos (over 5 minutes) using Manim animations. To systematically evaluate multimodal theorem explanations, we propose TheoremExplainBench, a benchmark covering 240 theorems across multiple STEM disciplines, along with 5 automated evaluation metrics. Our results reveal that agentic planning is essential for generating detailed long-form videos, and the o3-mini agent achieves a success rate of 93.8% and an overall score of 0.77. However, our quantitative and qualitative studies show that most of the videos produced exhibit minor issues with visual element layout. Furthermore, multimodal explanations expose deeper reasoning flaws that text-based explanations fail to reveal, highlighting the importance of multimodal explanations.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.332
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6663–6684
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.332/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Max Ku, Cheuk Hei Chong, Jonathan Leung, Krish Shah, Alvin Yu, and Wenhu Chen. 2025. TheoremExplainAgent: Towards Video-based Multimodal Explanations for LLM Theorem Understanding. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6663–6684, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TheoremExplainAgent: Towards Video-based Multimodal Explanations for LLM Theorem Understanding (Ku et al., ACL 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.332.pdf