Fast Neural Models for Symbolic Regression at Scale

Deep learning owes much of its success to the astonishing expressiveness of neural networks. However, this comes at the cost of complex, black-boxed models that extrapolate poorly beyond the domain of the training dataset, conflicting with goals of finding analytic expressions to describe science, engineering and real world data. Under the hypothesis that the hierarchical modularity of such laws can be captured by training a neural network, we introduce OccamNet, a neural network model that finds interpretable, compact, and sparse solutions for fitting data, \`{a} la Occam's razor. Our model defines a probability distribution over a non-differentiable function space. We introduce a two-step optimization method that samples functions and updates the weights with backpropagation based on cross-entropy matching in an evolutionary strategy: we train by biasing the probability mass toward better fitting solutions. OccamNet is able to fit a variety of symbolic laws including simple analytic functions, recursive programs, implicit functions, simple image classification, and can outperform noticeably state-of-the-art symbolic regression methods on real world regression datasets. Our method requires minimal memory footprint, does not require AI accelerators for efficient training, fits complicated functions in minutes of training on a single CPU, and demonstrates significant performance gains when scaled on a GPU. Our implementation, demonstrations and instructions for reproducing the experiments are available at https://github.com/druidowm/OccamNet_Public.