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Mar 12

MathBridge: A Large-Scale Dataset for Translating Mathematical Expressions into Formula Images

Understanding sentences that contain mathematical expressions in text form poses significant challenges. To address this, the importance of converting these expressions into formula images has been highlighted. For instance, the expression ``x equals minus b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus four a c, all over two a'' is more readily comprehensible when displayed as an image x = -b pm sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}{2a}. To develop a text-to-image conversion system, we can break down the process into text-to-LaTeX and LaTeX-to-image conversions, with the latter being managed with by existing various LaTeX engines. However, the former approach has been notably hindered by the severe scarcity of text-to-LaTeX paired data, presenting a significant challenge in the field.In this context, we introduce MathBridge, the first extensive dataset for translating mathematical spoken English into LaTeX, which aims to establish a robust baseline for future research in text-to-LaTeX translation. MathBridge comprises approximately 23 million LaTeX formulas paired with corresponding spoken English expressions. Through comprehensive evaluations, including fine-tuning and testing with data, we discovered that MathBridge significantly enhances pre-trained language models' capabilities for text-to-LaTeX translation. Specifically, for the T5-large model, the sacreBLEU score increased from 4.77 to 46.8, demonstrating substantial enhancement. Our findings indicate the necessity for a new metric specifically for text-to-LaTeX conversion evaluation.

One-connection rule for structural equation models

Linear structural equation models are multivariate statistical models encoded by mixed graphs. In particular, the set of covariance matrices for distributions belonging to a linear structural equation model for a fixed mixed graph G=(V, D,B) is parameterized by a rational function with parameters for each vertex and edge in G. This rational parametrization naturally allows for the study of these models from an algebraic and combinatorial point of view. Indeed, this point of view has led to a collection of results in the literature, mainly focusing on questions related to identifiability and determining relationships between covariances (i.e., finding polynomials in the Gaussian vanishing ideal). So far, a large proportion of these results has focused on the case when D, the directed part of the mixed graph G, is acyclic. This is due to the fact that in the acyclic case, the parametrization becomes polynomial and there is a description of the entries of the covariance matrices in terms of a finite sum. We move beyond the acyclic case and give a closed form expression for the entries of the covariance matrices in terms of the one-connections in a graph obtained from D through some small operations. This closed form expression then allows us to show that if G is simple, then the parametrization map is generically finite-to-one. Finally, having a closed form expression for the covariance matrices allows for the development of an algorithm for systematically exploring possible polynomials in the Gaussian vanishing ideal.

Automated Search for Conjectures on Mathematical Constants using Analysis of Integer Sequences

Formulas involving fundamental mathematical constants had a great impact on various fields of science and mathematics, for example aiding in proofs of irrationality of constants. However, the discovery of such formulas has historically remained scarce, often perceived as an act of mathematical genius by great mathematicians such as Ramanujan, Euler, and Gauss. Recent efforts to automate the discovery of formulas for mathematical constants, such as the Ramanujan Machine project, relied on exhaustive search. Despite several successful discoveries, exhaustive search remains limited by the space of options that can be covered and by the need for vast amounts of computational resources. Here we propose a fundamentally different method to search for conjectures on mathematical constants: through analysis of integer sequences. We introduce the Enumerated Signed-continued-fraction Massey Approve (ESMA) algorithm, which builds on the Berlekamp-Massey algorithm to identify patterns in integer sequences that represent mathematical constants. The ESMA algorithm found various known formulas for e, e^2, tan(1), and ratios of values of Bessel functions. The algorithm further discovered a large number of new conjectures for these constants, some providing simpler representations and some providing faster numerical convergence than the corresponding simple continued fractions. Along with the algorithm, we present mathematical tools for manipulating continued fractions. These connections enable us to characterize what space of constants can be found by ESMA and quantify its algorithmic advantage in certain scenarios. Altogether, this work continues in the development of augmenting mathematical intuition by computer algorithms, to help reveal mathematical structures and accelerate mathematical research.

High-performance symbolic-numerics via multiple dispatch

As mathematical computing becomes more democratized in high-level languages, high-performance symbolic-numeric systems are necessary for domain scientists and engineers to get the best performance out of their machine without deep knowledge of code optimization. Naturally, users need different term types either to have different algebraic properties for them, or to use efficient data structures. To this end, we developed Symbolics.jl, an extendable symbolic system which uses dynamic multiple dispatch to change behavior depending on the domain needs. In this work we detail an underlying abstract term interface which allows for speed without sacrificing generality. We show that by formalizing a generic API on actions independent of implementation, we can retroactively add optimized data structures to our system without changing the pre-existing term rewriters. We showcase how this can be used to optimize term construction and give a 113x acceleration on general symbolic transformations. Further, we show that such a generic API allows for complementary term-rewriting implementations. We demonstrate the ability to swap between classical term-rewriting simplifiers and e-graph-based term-rewriting simplifiers. We showcase an e-graph ruleset which minimizes the number of CPU cycles during expression evaluation, and demonstrate how it simplifies a real-world reaction-network simulation to halve the runtime. Additionally, we show a reaction-diffusion partial differential equation solver which is able to be automatically converted into symbolic expressions via multiple dispatch tracing, which is subsequently accelerated and parallelized to give a 157x simulation speedup. Together, this presents Symbolics.jl as a next-generation symbolic-numeric computing environment geared towards modeling and simulation.

MathCoder2: Better Math Reasoning from Continued Pretraining on Model-translated Mathematical Code

Code has been shown to be effective in enhancing the mathematical reasoning abilities of large language models due to its precision and accuracy. Previous works involving continued mathematical pretraining often include code that utilizes math-related packages, which are primarily designed for fields such as engineering, machine learning, signal processing, or module testing, rather than being directly focused on mathematical reasoning. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for generating mathematical code accompanied with corresponding reasoning steps for continued pretraining. Our approach begins with the construction of a high-quality mathematical continued pretraining dataset by incorporating math-related web data, code using mathematical packages, math textbooks, and synthetic data. Next, we construct reasoning steps by extracting LaTeX expressions, the conditions needed for the expressions, and the results of the expressions from the previously collected dataset. Based on this extracted information, we generate corresponding code to accurately capture the mathematical reasoning process. Appending the generated code to each reasoning step results in data consisting of paired natural language reasoning steps and their corresponding code. Combining this data with the original dataset results in a 19.2B-token high-performing mathematical pretraining corpus, which we name MathCode-Pile. Training several popular base models with this corpus significantly improves their mathematical abilities, leading to the creation of the MathCoder2 family of models. All of our data processing and training code is open-sourced, ensuring full transparency and easy reproducibility of the entire data collection and training pipeline. The code is released at https://github.com/mathllm/MathCoder2 .

RSRM: Reinforcement Symbolic Regression Machine

In nature, the behaviors of many complex systems can be described by parsimonious math equations. Automatically distilling these equations from limited data is cast as a symbolic regression process which hitherto remains a grand challenge. Keen efforts in recent years have been placed on tackling this issue and demonstrated success in symbolic regression. However, there still exist bottlenecks that current methods struggle to break when the discrete search space tends toward infinity and especially when the underlying math formula is intricate. To this end, we propose a novel Reinforcement Symbolic Regression Machine (RSRM) that masters the capability of uncovering complex math equations from only scarce data. The RSRM model is composed of three key modules: (1) a Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) agent that explores optimal math expression trees consisting of pre-defined math operators and variables, (2) a Double Q-learning block that helps reduce the feasible search space of MCTS via properly understanding the distribution of reward, and (3) a modulated sub-tree discovery block that heuristically learns and defines new math operators to improve representation ability of math expression trees. Biding of these modules yields the state-of-the-art performance of RSRM in symbolic regression as demonstrated by multiple sets of benchmark examples. The RSRM model shows clear superiority over several representative baseline models.

UniGeo: Unifying Geometry Logical Reasoning via Reformulating Mathematical Expression

Geometry problem solving is a well-recognized testbed for evaluating the high-level multi-modal reasoning capability of deep models. In most existing works, two main geometry problems: calculation and proving, are usually treated as two specific tasks, hindering a deep model to unify its reasoning capability on multiple math tasks. However, in essence, these two tasks have similar problem representations and overlapped math knowledge which can improve the understanding and reasoning ability of a deep model on both two tasks. Therefore, we construct a large-scale Unified Geometry problem benchmark, UniGeo, which contains 4,998 calculation problems and 9,543 proving problems. Each proving problem is annotated with a multi-step proof with reasons and mathematical expressions. The proof can be easily reformulated as a proving sequence that shares the same formats with the annotated program sequence for calculation problems. Naturally, we also present a unified multi-task Geometric Transformer framework, Geoformer, to tackle calculation and proving problems simultaneously in the form of sequence generation, which finally shows the reasoning ability can be improved on both two tasks by unifying formulation. Furthermore, we propose a Mathematical Expression Pretraining (MEP) method that aims to predict the mathematical expressions in the problem solution, thus improving the Geoformer model. Experiments on the UniGeo demonstrate that our proposed Geoformer obtains state-of-the-art performance by outperforming task-specific model NGS with over 5.6% and 3.2% accuracies on calculation and proving problems, respectively.

Math Word Problem Solving by Generating Linguistic Variants of Problem Statements

The art of mathematical reasoning stands as a fundamental pillar of intellectual progress and is a central catalyst in cultivating human ingenuity. Researchers have recently published a plethora of works centered around the task of solving Math Word Problems (MWP) - a crucial stride towards general AI. These existing models are susceptible to dependency on shallow heuristics and spurious correlations to derive the solution expressions. In order to ameliorate this issue, in this paper, we propose a framework for MWP solvers based on the generation of linguistic variants of the problem text. The approach involves solving each of the variant problems and electing the predicted expression with the majority of the votes. We use DeBERTa (Decoding-enhanced BERT with disentangled attention) as the encoder to leverage its rich textual representations and enhanced mask decoder to construct the solution expressions. Furthermore, we introduce a challenging dataset, Psmall{ARAMAWPS}, consisting of paraphrased, adversarial, and inverse variants of selectively sampled MWPs from the benchmark Msmall{AWPS} dataset. We extensively experiment on this dataset along with other benchmark datasets using some baseline MWP solver models. We show that training on linguistic variants of problem statements and voting on candidate predictions improve the mathematical reasoning and robustness of the model. We make our code and data publicly available.

A Benchmark for Math Misconceptions: Bridging Gaps in Middle School Algebra with AI-Supported Instruction

This study introduces an evaluation benchmark for middle school algebra to be used in artificial intelligence(AI) based educational platforms. The goal is to support the design of AI systems that can enhance learner conceptual understanding of algebra by taking into account their current level of algebra comprehension. The data set comprises 55 misconceptions about algebra, common errors, and 220 diagnostic examples identified in previous peer-reviewed studies. We provide an example application using a large language model, observing a range of precision and recall scores depending on the topic and experimental setup that reaches 83.9% when including educator feedback and restricting it by topic. We found that topics such as ratios and proportions prove as difficult for LLMs as they are for students. We included a human assessment of LLMs results and feedback from five middle school math educators on the clarity and occurrence of misconceptions in the dataset and the potential use of AI in conjunction with the dataset. Most educators (80% or more) indicated that they encounter these misconceptions among their students, suggesting the relevance of the data set to teaching middle school algebra. Despite varying familiarity with AI tools, four out of five educators expressed interest in using the data set with AI to diagnose student misconceptions or train teachers. The results emphasize the importance of topic-constrained testing, the need for multimodal approaches, and the relevance of human expertise to gain practical insights when using AI for human learning.

A Neural-Guided Dynamic Symbolic Network for Exploring Mathematical Expressions from Data

Symbolic regression (SR) is a powerful technique for discovering the underlying mathematical expressions from observed data. Inspired by the success of deep learning, recent efforts have focused on two categories for SR methods. One is using a neural network or genetic programming to search the expression tree directly. Although this has shown promising results, the large search space poses difficulties in learning constant factors and processing high-dimensional problems. Another approach is leveraging a transformer-based model training on synthetic data and offers advantages in inference speed. However, this method is limited to fixed small numbers of dimensions and may encounter inference problems when given data is out-of-distribution compared to the synthetic data. In this work, we propose DySymNet, a novel neural-guided Dynamic Symbolic Network for SR. Instead of searching for expressions within a large search space, we explore DySymNet with various structures and optimize them to identify expressions that better-fitting the data. With a topology structure like neural networks, DySymNet not only tackles the challenge of high-dimensional problems but also proves effective in optimizing constants. Based on extensive numerical experiments using low-dimensional public standard benchmarks and the well-known SRBench with more variables, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of fitting accuracy and robustness to noise.

LogicSolver: Towards Interpretable Math Word Problem Solving with Logical Prompt-enhanced Learning

Recently, deep learning models have made great progress in MWP solving on answer accuracy. However, they are uninterpretable since they mainly rely on shallow heuristics to achieve high performance without understanding and reasoning the grounded math logic. To address this issue and make a step towards interpretable MWP solving, we first construct a high-quality MWP dataset named InterMWP which consists of 11,495 MWPs and annotates interpretable logical formulas based on algebraic knowledge as the grounded linguistic logic of each solution equation. Different from existing MWP datasets, our InterMWP benchmark asks for a solver to not only output the solution expressions but also predict the corresponding logical formulas. We further propose a novel approach with logical prompt and interpretation generation, called LogicSolver. For each MWP, our LogicSolver first retrieves some highly-correlated algebraic knowledge and then passes them to the backbone model as prompts to improve the semantic representations of MWPs. With these improved semantic representations, our LogicSolver generates corresponding solution expressions and interpretable knowledge formulas in accord with the generated solution expressions, simultaneously. Experimental results show that our LogicSolver has stronger logical formula-based interpretability than baselines while achieving higher answer accuracy with the help of logical prompts, simultaneously. The source code and dataset is available at https://github.com/yangzhch6/InterMWP.

MATHSENSEI: A Tool-Augmented Large Language Model for Mathematical Reasoning

Tool-augmented Large Language Models (TALM) are known to enhance the skillset of large language models (LLM), thereby, leading to their improved reasoning abilities across many tasks. While, TALMs have been successfully employed in different question-answering benchmarks, their efficacy on complex mathematical reasoning benchmarks, and the potential complimentary benefits offered by tools for knowledge retrieval and mathematical equation solving, are open research questions. In this work, we present MATHSENSEI, a tool-augmented large language model for mathematical reasoning. Augmented with tools for knowledge retrieval (Bing Web Search), program execution (Python), and symbolic equation solving (Wolfram-Alpha), we study the complimentary benefits of these tools through evaluations on mathematical reasoning datasets. We perform exhaustive ablations on MATH,a popular dataset for evaluating mathematical reasoning on diverse mathematical disciplines. We also conduct experiments involving well-known tool planners to study the impact of tool sequencing on the model performance. MATHSENSEI achieves 13.5% better accuracy over gpt-3.5-turbo with chain-of-thought on the MATH dataset. We further observe that TALMs are not as effective for simpler math word problems (in GSM-8k), and the benefit increases as the complexity and required knowledge increases (progressively over AQuA, MMLU-Math, and higher level complex questions in MATH). The code and data are available at https://github.com/Debrup-61/MathSensei.

Math Agents: Computational Infrastructure, Mathematical Embedding, and Genomics

The advancement in generative AI could be boosted with more accessible mathematics. Beyond human-AI chat, large language models (LLMs) are emerging in programming, algorithm discovery, and theorem proving, yet their genomics application is limited. This project introduces Math Agents and mathematical embedding as fresh entries to the "Moore's Law of Mathematics", using a GPT-based workflow to convert equations from literature into LaTeX and Python formats. While many digital equation representations exist, there's a lack of automated large-scale evaluation tools. LLMs are pivotal as linguistic user interfaces, providing natural language access for human-AI chat and formal languages for large-scale AI-assisted computational infrastructure. Given the infinite formal possibility spaces, Math Agents, which interact with math, could potentially shift us from "big data" to "big math". Math, unlike the more flexible natural language, has properties subject to proof, enabling its use beyond traditional applications like high-validation math-certified icons for AI alignment aims. This project aims to use Math Agents and mathematical embeddings to address the ageing issue in information systems biology by applying multiscalar physics mathematics to disease models and genomic data. Generative AI with episodic memory could help analyse causal relations in longitudinal health records, using SIR Precision Health models. Genomic data is suggested for addressing the unsolved Alzheimer's disease problem.

Generating Mathematical Derivations with Large Language Models

The derivation of mathematical results in specialised fields using Large Language Models (LLMs) is an emerging research direction that can help identify models' limitations, and potentially support mathematical discovery. In this paper, we leverage a symbolic engine to generate derivations of equations at scale, and investigate the capabilities of LLMs when deriving goal equations from premises. Specifically, we employ in-context learning for GPT and fine-tune a range of T5 models to compare the robustness and generalisation of pre-training strategies to specialised models. Empirical results show that fine-tuned FLAN-T5-large (MathT5) outperforms GPT models on all static and out-of-distribution test sets in terms of absolute performance. However, an in-depth analysis reveals that the fine-tuned models are more sensitive to perturbations involving unseen symbols and (to a lesser extent) changes to equation structure. In addition, we analyse 1.7K equations and over 200 derivations to highlight common reasoning errors such as the inclusion of incorrect, irrelevant, and redundant equations, along with the tendency to skip derivation steps. Finally, we explore the suitability of existing metrics for evaluating mathematical derivations finding evidence that, while they capture general properties such as sensitivity to perturbations, they fail to highlight fine-grained reasoning errors and essential differences between models. Overall, this work demonstrates that training models on synthetic data can improve their mathematical capabilities beyond larger architectures.

Evaluating and Improving Tool-Augmented Computation-Intensive Math Reasoning

Chain-of-thought prompting~(CoT) and tool augmentation have been validated in recent work as effective practices for improving large language models~(LLMs) to perform step-by-step reasoning on complex math-related tasks. However, most existing math reasoning datasets may be not able to fully evaluate and analyze the ability of LLMs in manipulating tools and performing reasoning, as they may only require very few invocations of tools or miss annotations for evaluating intermediate reasoning steps. To address the issue, we construct CARP, a new Chinese dataset consisting of 4,886 computation-intensive algebra problems with formulated annotations on intermediate steps. In CARP, we test four LLMs with CoT prompting, and find that they are all prone to make mistakes at the early steps of the solution, leading to wrong answers. Based on this finding, we propose a new approach that can deliberate the reasoning steps with tool interfaces, namely DELI. In DELI, we first initialize a step-by-step solution based on retrieved exemplars, then iterate two deliberation procedures that check and refine the intermediate steps of the generated solution, from the perspectives of tool manipulation and natural language reasoning, until obtaining converged solutions or reaching the maximum turn. Experimental results on CARP and six other datasets show that the proposed DELI mostly outperforms competitive baselines, and can further boost the performance of existing CoT methods. Our data and code are available in https://github.com/RUCAIBox/CARP.

Can LLMs Master Math? Investigating Large Language Models on Math Stack Exchange

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in various natural language tasks, often achieving performances that surpass those of humans. Despite these advancements, the domain of mathematics presents a distinctive challenge, primarily due to its specialized structure and the precision it demands. In this study, we adopted a two-step approach for investigating the proficiency of LLMs in answering mathematical questions. First, we employ the most effective LLMs, as identified by their performance on math question-answer benchmarks, to generate answers to 78 questions from the Math Stack Exchange (MSE). Second, a case analysis is conducted on the LLM that showed the highest performance, focusing on the quality and accuracy of its answers through manual evaluation. We found that GPT-4 performs best (nDCG of 0.48 and P@10 of 0.37) amongst existing LLMs fine-tuned for answering mathematics questions and outperforms the current best approach on ArqMATH3 Task1, considering P@10. Our Case analysis indicates that while the GPT-4 can generate relevant responses in certain instances, it does not consistently answer all questions accurately. This paper explores the current limitations of LLMs in navigating complex mathematical problem-solving. Through case analysis, we shed light on the gaps in LLM capabilities within mathematics, thereby setting the stage for future research and advancements in AI-driven mathematical reasoning. We make our code and findings publicly available for research: https://github.com/gipplab/LLM-Investig-MathStackExchange

SNIP: Bridging Mathematical Symbolic and Numeric Realms with Unified Pre-training

In an era where symbolic mathematical equations are indispensable for modeling complex natural phenomena, scientific inquiry often involves collecting observations and translating them into mathematical expressions. Recently, deep learning has emerged as a powerful tool for extracting insights from data. However, existing models typically specialize in either numeric or symbolic domains, and are usually trained in a supervised manner tailored to specific tasks. This approach neglects the substantial benefits that could arise from a task-agnostic unified understanding between symbolic equations and their numeric counterparts. To bridge the gap, we introduce SNIP, a Symbolic-Numeric Integrated Pre-training, which employs joint contrastive learning between symbolic and numeric domains, enhancing their mutual similarities in the pre-trained embeddings. By performing latent space analysis, we observe that SNIP provides cross-domain insights into the representations, revealing that symbolic supervision enhances the embeddings of numeric data and vice versa. We evaluate SNIP across diverse tasks, including symbolic-to-numeric mathematical property prediction and numeric-to-symbolic equation discovery, commonly known as symbolic regression. Results show that SNIP effectively transfers to various tasks, consistently outperforming fully supervised baselines and competing strongly with established task-specific methods, especially in few-shot learning scenarios where available data is limited.