Deep Variational Inference Symbolic Regression

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Butterworth, James, Grigorian, Gevik, DiazDelaO, Alejandro
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Butterworth, James
Grigorian, Gevik
DiazDelaO, Alejandro
author_facet Butterworth, James
Grigorian, Gevik
DiazDelaO, Alejandro
contents Symbolic regression discovers explicit, interpretable equations without assuming a functional form in advance. A Bayesian approach strengthens this through probability distributions over candidate expressions, thus quantifying uncertainty in the presence of noisy and limited data. Deep Symbolic Regression (DSR) uses a neural network to generate symbolic expressions, but it is designed to identify a single best-fitting expression rather than infer a posterior distribution over models. We introduce Deep Variational Inference Symbolic Regression (DVISR), a variational Bayesian extension of DSR. DVISR replaces the original reward with the integrand of the evidence lower bound. It also extends the network architecture to output distributions over constants within expressions, enabling posterior inference over both expression trees and their associated constants. We show that DVISR can recover the true posterior in simple settings, both with and without constant tokens, and we examine how its performance changes as the size of the expression space increases. These results position DVISR as a step toward scalable Bayesian symbolic regression with uncertainty over full symbolic models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_01067
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deep Variational Inference Symbolic Regression
Butterworth, James
Grigorian, Gevik
DiazDelaO, Alejandro
Machine Learning
I.2.6
Symbolic regression discovers explicit, interpretable equations without assuming a functional form in advance. A Bayesian approach strengthens this through probability distributions over candidate expressions, thus quantifying uncertainty in the presence of noisy and limited data. Deep Symbolic Regression (DSR) uses a neural network to generate symbolic expressions, but it is designed to identify a single best-fitting expression rather than infer a posterior distribution over models. We introduce Deep Variational Inference Symbolic Regression (DVISR), a variational Bayesian extension of DSR. DVISR replaces the original reward with the integrand of the evidence lower bound. It also extends the network architecture to output distributions over constants within expressions, enabling posterior inference over both expression trees and their associated constants. We show that DVISR can recover the true posterior in simple settings, both with and without constant tokens, and we examine how its performance changes as the size of the expression space increases. These results position DVISR as a step toward scalable Bayesian symbolic regression with uncertainty over full symbolic models.
title Deep Variational Inference Symbolic Regression
topic Machine Learning
I.2.6
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01067