{"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-with-a-learned-concept","title":"Symbolic Regression with a Learned Concept Library","arxiv_id":"2409.09359","date":"2024-09-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["Arya Grayeli","Atharva Sehgal","Omar Costilla-Reyes","Miles Cranmer","Swarat Chaudhuri"],"abstract":"We present a novel method for symbolic regression (SR), the task of searching for compact programmatic hypotheses that best explain a dataset. The problem is commonly solved using genetic algorithms; we show that we can enhance such methods by inducing a library of abstract textual concepts. Our algorithm, called LaSR, uses zero-shot queries to a large language model (LLM) to discover and evolve concepts occurring in known high-performing hypotheses. We discover new hypotheses using a mix of standard evolutionary steps and LLM-guided steps (obtained through zero-shot LLM queries) conditioned on discovered concepts. Once discovered, hypotheses are used in a new round of concept abstraction and evolution. We validate LaSR on the Feynman equations, a popular SR benchmark, as well as a set of synthetic tasks. On these benchmarks, LaSR substantially outperforms a variety of state-of-the-art SR approaches based on deep learning and evolutionary algorithms. Moreover, we show that LaSR can be used to discover a novel and powerful scaling law for LLMs.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.09359v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09359v3.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-with-a-learned-concept","repo_url":"https://github.com/trishullab/LibraryAugmentedSymbolicRegression.jl","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"evolutionary-algorithms","task_name":"Evolutionary Algorithms"},{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"large-language-model","task_name":"Large Language Model"},{"task_slug":"symbolic-regression","task_name":"Symbolic Regression"},{"task_slug":"regression-1","task_name":"regression"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":null,"method_name":"Library"},{"method_slug":"set","method_name":"SET"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2409.09359","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}