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Discovering Symbolic Models from Deep Learning with Inductive Biases (arxiv.org)
4 points by che_shr_cat on Jul 20, 2020 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A network that models how objects affect each other is trained to keep its inner signals sparse, then simple equations are fitted to those signals. It recovered known force laws and found a new dark matter formula that beats the network on unseen data.

Abstract

We develop a general approach to distill symbolic representations of a learned deep model by introducing strong inductive biases. We focus on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). The technique works as follows: we first encourage sparse latent representations when we train a GNN in a supervised setting, then we apply symbolic regression to components of the learned model to extract explicit physical relations. We find the correct known equations, including force laws and Hamiltonians, can be extracted from the neural network. We then apply our method to a non-trivial cosmology example-a detailed dark matter simulation-and discover a new analytic formula which can predict the concentration of dark matter from the mass distribution of nearby cosmic structures. The symbolic expressions extracted from the GNN using our technique also generalized to out-of-distribution data better than the GNN itself. Our approach offers alternative directions for interpreting neural networks and discovering novel physical principles from the representations they learn.

Miles Cranmer, Alvaro Sanchez-Gonzalez, Peter Battaglia, Rui Xu, Kyle Cranmer, David Spergel, Shirley Ho
arXiv:2006.11287 · cs.LG, astro-ph.CO, astro-ph.IM, physics.comp-ph, stat.ML · submitted Jun 19, 2020 · updated Nov 18, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to NeurIPS 2020. 9 pages content + 16 pages appendix/references. Supporting code found at https://github.com/MilesCranmer/symbolic_deep_learning

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