Neuro-Symbolic AI for Analytical Solutions of Differential Equations
cs.LG, cs.NA, math.NA, physics.comp-ph
Submitted: 2025-02-03
Updated: 2026-05-21
Comments: Updates the method and added extra results
Journal ref: Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 306:94420-94451, 2026
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
The gist: Analytical solutions to differential equations offer exact, interpretable insight but are rarely available because discovering them requires expert intuition or exhaustive search of combinatorial
Terminology
Abstract
Analytical solutions to differential equations offer exact, interpretable insight but are rarely available because discovering them requires expert intuition or exhaustive search of combinatorial spaces. We introduce SIGS, a neuro-symbolic framework for equation-driven closed-form solution discovery. SIGS uses a context-free grammar to generate mathematically valid and physically meaningful building blocks, with a user-specified Ansatz prescribing how these blocks combine, embeds them into a topology-regularised continuous latent manifold, and searches this manifold in two stages: structure selection followed by coefficient refinement using gradient descent, scoring candidates only against the PDE residual and prescribed boundary and initial conditions. This design unifies symbolic reasoning with numerical optimization; the grammar constrains candidate solution blocks to be proper by construction, while the latent search makes exploration tractable and data-free. SIGS is the first neuro-symbolic method to (i) recover analytical solutions for coupled nonlinear PDE systems, (ii) discover equivalent symbolic forms when the grammar lacks the natural primitives, and (iii) produce accurate symbolic approximations for PDEs lacking known closed-form solutions. Overall, SIGS improves over existing symbolic methods by orders of magnitude in both accuracy and runtime across standard PDE benchmarks.
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