用连续嵌入优化方程结构,提升符号回归效率与准确性
Neural Structure Embedding for Symbolic Regression via Continuous Structure Search and Coefficient Optimization
- 将方程结构转为连续向量空间,支持梯度优化搜索
- 在合成与真实数据上优于现有方法,精度与效率双提升
- 适合需要可解释模型的科研与工程场景
符号回归旨在发现能解释观测数据的人类可读方程。现有方法依赖离散结构搜索(如遗传编程),常导致计算成本高、性能不稳定,且难以扩展至大规模方程空间。为此,我们提出SRCO——一种统一的嵌入驱动框架,将符号结构映射到可优化的连续表示空间。该框架包含三部分:(1) 结构嵌入:利用传统符号回归算法生成大量候选方程,训练Transformer模型将其压缩为连续嵌入;(2) 连续结构搜索:在嵌入空间中通过梯度或采样优化高效探索,显著降低组合结构空间的搜索成本;(3) 系数优化:将符号系数视为可学习参数,采用梯度优化获得精确数值。在合成与真实数据集上的实验表明,本方法在方程准确率、鲁棒性和搜索效率方面均持续优于当前最优方法。该工作通过融合符号方程发现与连续嵌入学习,引入了符号回归的新范式。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Symbolic regression aims to discover human-interpretable equations that explain observational data. However, existing approaches rely heavily on discrete structure search (e.g., genetic programming), which often leads to high computational cost, unstable performance, and limited scalability to large equation spaces. To address these challenges, we propose SRCO, a unified embedding-driven framework for symbolic regression that transforms symbolic structures into a continuous, optimizable representation space. The framework consists of three key components: (1) structure embedding: we first generate a large pool of exploratory equations using traditional symbolic regression algorithms and train a Transformer model to compress symbolic structures into a continuous embedding space; (2) continuous structure search: the embedding space enables efficient exploration using gradient-based or sampling-based optimization, significantly reducing the cost of navigating the combinatorial structure space; and (3) coefficient optimization: for each discovered structure, we treat symbolic coefficients as learnable parameters and apply gradient optimization to obtain accurate numerical values. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in equation accuracy, robustness, and search efficiency. This work introduces a new paradigm for symbolic regression by bridging symbolic equation discovery with continuous embedding learning and optimization.
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