Pretrained Language Models are Symbolic Mathematics Solvers too!

Kimia Noorbakhsh, Modar Sulaiman, Mahdi Sharifi, KALLOL ROY, Pooyan Jamshidi

Abstract: Solving symbolic mathematics has always been of in the arena of human ingenuity that needs compositional reasoning and recurrence. However, recent studies have shown that large scale language models such as transformers are universal and surprisingly can be trained as a sequence-to-sequence task to solve complex mathematical equations. These large transformer models need humongous amounts of training data to generalize to unseen symbolic mathematics problems. In this paper, we present a sample efficient way of solving the symbolic tasks by first pretraining the transformer model with language translation and then fine-tuning the pretrained transformer model to solve the downstream task of symbolic mathematics. We achieve comparable accuracy on the integration task with our pretrained model while using around $1.5$ orders of magnitude less number of training samples with respect to the state-of-the-art deep learning for symbolic mathematics. The test accuracy on differential equation tasks is considerably lower comparing with integration as they need higher order recursions that are not present in language translations. We pretrain our model with different pairs of language translations. Our results show language bias in solving symbolic mathematics tasks. Finally, we study the robustness of the fine-tuned model on symbolic math tasks against distribution shift, and our approach generalizes better in distribution shift scenarios for the function integration.

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2110.03501/code)