Reinforcement Symbolic Regression Machine
Authors: Yilong Xu,Yang Liu,Hao Sun
Presentation: ICLR 2024,Poster

Abstract: In nature, the behavior of many complex systems can be described by parsimonious math equations. Symbolic Regression (SR) is defined as the task of automatically distilling equations from limited data. Keen efforts have been placed on tackling this issue and demonstrated success in SR. However, there still exist bottlenecks that current methods struggle to break, when the expressions we need to explore tend toward infinity and especially when the underlying math formula is intricate. To this end, we propose a novel Reinforcement Symbolic Regression Machine (RSRM) that masters the capability of uncovering complex math equations from only scarce data. The RSRM model is composed of three key modules: (1) a Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) agent, designed for exploration, that explores optimal math expression trees consisting of pre-defined math operators and variables, (2) a Double Q-learning block,  designed for exploitation, that helps reduce the feasible search space of MCTS via properly understanding the distribution of reward, and (3) a modulated sub-tree discovery block that heuristically learns and defines new math operators to improve representation ability of math expression trees. Binding of these modules yields the SOTA performance of RSRM in SR as demonstrated by multiple benchmark datasets. The RSRM shows clear superiority over several representative baseline models.