{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/symbolic-regression-via-deep-reinforcement","title":"Symbolic Regression via Deep Reinforcement Learning Enhanced Genetic Programming Seeding","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2021-12-01","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2021 12","authors":["Terrell Mundhenk","Mikel Landajuela","Ruben Glatt","Claudio Santiago","Daniel Faissol","Brenden Petersen"],"abstract":"Symbolic regression is the process of identifying mathematical expressions that fit observed output from a black-box process. It is a discrete optimization problem generally believed to be NP-hard. Prior approaches to solving the problem include neural-guided search (e.g. using reinforcement learning) and genetic programming. In this work, we introduce a hybrid neural-guided/genetic programming approach to symbolic regression and other combinatorial optimization problems. We propose a neural-guided component used to seed the starting population of a random restart genetic programming component, gradually learning better starting populations. On a number of common benchmark tasks to recover underlying expressions from a dataset, our method recovers 65% more expressions than a recently published top-performing model using the same experimental setup. We demonstrate that running many genetic programming generations without interdependence on the neural-guided component performs better for symbolic regression than alternative formulations where the two are more strongly coupled. Finally, we introduce a new set of 22 symbolic regression benchmark problems with increased difficulty over existing benchmarks. Source code is provided at www.github.com/brendenpetersen/deep-symbolic-optimization.","url_abs":"http://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/hash/d073bb8d0c47f317dd39de9c9f004e9d-Abstract.html","url_pdf":"http://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/file/d073bb8d0c47f317dd39de9c9f004e9d-Paper.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"symbolic-regression-via-deep-reinforcement","repo_url":"https://github.com/brendenpetersen/deep-symbolic-optimization","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"BSD-3-Clause"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"combinatorial-optimization","task_name":"Combinatorial Optimization"},{"task_slug":"deep-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Deep Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"symbolic-regression","task_name":"Symbolic Regression"},{"task_slug":"regression-1","task_name":"regression"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}