Physical Symbolic Optimization

Abstract

We present a framework for constraining the automatic sequential generation of equations to obey the rules of dimensional analysis by construction. Combining this approach with reinforcement learning, we built $\Phi$-SO, a Physical Symbolic Optimization method for recovering analytical functions from physical data leveraging units constraints. Our symbolic regression algorithm achieves state-of-the-art results in contexts in which variables and constants have known physical units, outperforming all other methods on SRBench's Feynman benchmark in the presence of noise (exceeding 0.1%) and showing resilience even in the presence of significant (10%) levels of noise.