Abstract:
Symbolic equations are at the core of scientific discovery.
The task of discovering the underlying equation from a set of input-output pairs is called symbolic regression. Traditionally, symbolic regression methods use hand-designed strategies that do not improve with experience.
In this paper, we introduce the first symbolic regression method that leverages large scale pre-training. We procedurally generate an unbounded set of equations, and simultaneously pre-train a Transformer to predict the symbolic equation from a corresponding set of input-output-pairs. At test time, we query the model on a new set of points and use its output to guide the search for the equation.
We show empirically that this approach can re-discover a set of well-known physical equations, and that it improves over time with more data and compute.
