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Main Authors: Ying, Wangyang, Zhang, Jinghan, Bai, Haoyue, Gong, Nanxu, Wang, Xinyuan, Liu, Kunpeng, Reddy, Chandan K., Fu, Yanjie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19487
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author Ying, Wangyang
Zhang, Jinghan
Bai, Haoyue
Gong, Nanxu
Wang, Xinyuan
Liu, Kunpeng
Reddy, Chandan K.
Fu, Yanjie
author_facet Ying, Wangyang
Zhang, Jinghan
Bai, Haoyue
Gong, Nanxu
Wang, Xinyuan
Liu, Kunpeng
Reddy, Chandan K.
Fu, Yanjie
contents Discovering interpretable mathematical equations from observed data (a.k.a. equation discovery or symbolic regression) is a cornerstone of scientific discovery, enabling transparent modeling of physical, biological, and economic systems. While foundation models pre-trained on large-scale equation datasets offer a promising starting point, they often suffer from negative transfer and poor generalization when applied to small, domain-specific datasets. In this paper, we introduce EQUATE (Equation Generation via QUality-Aligned Transfer Embeddings), a data-efficient fine-tuning framework that adapts foundation models for symbolic equation discovery in low-data regimes via distillation. EQUATE combines symbolic-numeric alignment with evaluator-guided embedding optimization, enabling a principled embedding-search-generation paradigm. Our approach reformulates discrete equation search as a continuous optimization task in a shared embedding space, guided by data-equation fitness and simplicity. Experiments across three standard public benchmarks (Feynman, Strogatz, and black-box datasets) demonstrate that EQUATE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both accuracy and robustness, while preserving low complexity and fast inference. These results highlight EQUATE as a practical and generalizable solution for data-efficient symbolic regression in foundation model distillation settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_19487
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Data-Efficient Symbolic Regression via Foundation Model Distillation
Ying, Wangyang
Zhang, Jinghan
Bai, Haoyue
Gong, Nanxu
Wang, Xinyuan
Liu, Kunpeng
Reddy, Chandan K.
Fu, Yanjie
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Discovering interpretable mathematical equations from observed data (a.k.a. equation discovery or symbolic regression) is a cornerstone of scientific discovery, enabling transparent modeling of physical, biological, and economic systems. While foundation models pre-trained on large-scale equation datasets offer a promising starting point, they often suffer from negative transfer and poor generalization when applied to small, domain-specific datasets. In this paper, we introduce EQUATE (Equation Generation via QUality-Aligned Transfer Embeddings), a data-efficient fine-tuning framework that adapts foundation models for symbolic equation discovery in low-data regimes via distillation. EQUATE combines symbolic-numeric alignment with evaluator-guided embedding optimization, enabling a principled embedding-search-generation paradigm. Our approach reformulates discrete equation search as a continuous optimization task in a shared embedding space, guided by data-equation fitness and simplicity. Experiments across three standard public benchmarks (Feynman, Strogatz, and black-box datasets) demonstrate that EQUATE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both accuracy and robustness, while preserving low complexity and fast inference. These results highlight EQUATE as a practical and generalizable solution for data-efficient symbolic regression in foundation model distillation settings.
title Data-Efficient Symbolic Regression via Foundation Model Distillation
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19487