Boolformer: Symbolic Regression of Logic Functions with Transformers
Authors: name: Stéphane d'Ascoli; name: Samy Bengio; name: Josh Susskind; name: Emmanuel Abbé
Published: 2023-09-21 16:11:38

Abstract: In this work, we introduce Boolformer, the first Transformer architecture
trained to perform end-to-end symbolic regression of Boolean functions. First,
we show that it can predict compact formulas for complex functions which were
not seen during training, when provided a clean truth table. Then, we
demonstrate its ability to find approximate expressions when provided
incomplete and noisy observations. We evaluate the Boolformer on a broad set of
real-world binary classification datasets, demonstrating its potential as an
interpretable alternative to classic machine learning methods. Finally, we
apply it to the widespread task of modelling the dynamics of gene regulatory
networks. Using a recent benchmark, we show that Boolformer is competitive with
state-of-the art genetic algorithms with a speedup of several orders of
magnitude. Our code and models are available publicly.