Transformer-based Planning for Symbolic Regression

Parshin Shojaee, Kazem Meidani, Amir Barati Farimani, Chandan K. Reddy

Keywords: Symbolic Regression, Transformers, Planning, Deep Learning

TL;DR: We introduce a novel transformer-based planning framework for symbolic regression by leveraging priors of large-scale pretrained models and incorporating lookahead planning.

Abstract: Symbolic regression (SR) is a challenging task in machine learning that involves finding a mathematical expression for a function based on its values. Recent advancements in SR have demonstrated the effectiveness of pre-trained transformer models in generating equations as sequences, leveraging large-scale pre-training on synthetic datasets and offering notable advantages in terms of inference time over classical Genetic Programming (GP) methods. However, these models primarily rely on supervised pre-training objectives borrowed from text generation and overlook equation discovery goals like accuracy and complexity. To address this, we propose TPSR, a Transformer-based Planning strategy for Symbolic Regression that incorporates Monte Carlo Tree Search planning algorithm into the transformer decoding process. Unlike conventional decoding strategies, TPSR enables the integration of non-differentiable equation verification feedback, such as fitting accuracy and complexity, as external sources of knowledge into the transformer equation generation process. Extensive experiments on various datasets show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, enhancing the model's fitting-complexity trade-off, extrapolation abilities, and robustness to noise.

Submission Number: 13018