Discovering Symbolic Models from Deep Learning with Inductive Biases

Kavli Affiliate: David Spergel

| First 5 Authors: Miles Cranmer, Alvaro Sanchez-Gonzalez, Peter Battaglia, Rui Xu, Kyle Cranmer

| Summary:

We develop a general approach to distill symbolic representations of a
learned deep model by introducing strong inductive biases. We focus on Graph
Neural Networks (GNNs). The technique works as follows: we first encourage
sparse latent representations when we train a GNN in a supervised setting, then
we apply symbolic regression to components of the learned model to extract
explicit physical relations. We find the correct known equations, including
force laws and Hamiltonians, can be extracted from the neural network. We then
apply our method to a non-trivial cosmology example-a detailed dark matter
simulation-and discover a new analytic formula which can predict the
concentration of dark matter from the mass distribution of nearby cosmic
structures. The symbolic expressions extracted from the GNN using our technique
also generalized to out-of-distribution data better than the GNN itself. Our
approach offers alternative directions for interpreting neural networks and
discovering novel physical principles from the representations they learn.

| Search Query: ArXiv Query: search_query=au:”David Spergel”&id_list=&start=0&max_results=10

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