about
In-Context Symbolic Regression: Using Language Models for Function Discovery (arxiv.org)
3 points by PaulHoule on May 12, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A language model proposes equation shapes from the data, a separate optimizer fits their numbers, and the loop repeats to fix errors. On four standard benchmarks it matched or beat the best specialized tools, with simpler equations that generalize better beyond the training data.

Abstract · In-Context Symbolic Regression: Leveraging Large Language Models for Function Discovery

State of the art Symbolic Regression (SR) methods currently build specialized models, while the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce the first comprehensive framework that utilizes LLMs for the task of SR. We propose In-Context Symbolic Regression (ICSR), an SR method which iteratively refines a functional form with an LLM and determines its coefficients with an external optimizer. ICSR leverages LLMs' strong mathematical prior both to propose an initial set of possible functions given the observations and to refine them based on their errors. Our findings reveal that LLMs are able to successfully find symbolic equations that fit the given data, matching or outperforming the overall performance of the best SR baselines on four popular benchmarks, while yielding simpler equations with better out of distribution generalization.

Matteo Merler, Katsiaryna Haitsiukevich, Nicola Dainese, Pekka Marttinen
arXiv:2404.19094 · cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Apr 29, 2024 · updated Jul 17, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · 18 pages, 11 figures

add comment on HN