A Neural Symbolic Model for Space Physics
This work addresses the challenge of automated physics discovery for researchers in space physics, though it is incremental as it builds on existing symbolic regression methods.
The study tackled the problem of discovering physical formulas from data using symbolic regression, resulting in a model that outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in accuracy and consistency, and successfully applied it to upgrade a NASA formula and explain solar activity cycles.
In this study, we unveil a new AI model, termed PhyE2E, to discover physical formulas through symbolic regression. PhyE2E simplifies symbolic regression by decomposing it into sub-problems using the second-order derivatives of an oracle neural network, and employs a transformer model to translate data into symbolic formulas in an end-to-end manner. The resulting formulas are refined through Monte-Carlo Tree Search and Genetic Programming. We leverage a large language model to synthesize extensive symbolic expressions resembling real physics, and train the model to recover these formulas directly from data. A comprehensive evaluation reveals that PhyE2E outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, delivering superior symbolic accuracy, precision in data fitting, and consistency in physical units. We deployed PhyE2E to five applications in space physics, including the prediction of sunspot numbers, solar rotational angular velocity, emission line contribution functions, near-Earth plasma pressure, and lunar-tide plasma signals. The physical formulas generated by AI demonstrate a high degree of accuracy in fitting the experimental data from satellites and astronomical telescopes. We have successfully upgraded the formula proposed by NASA in 1993 regarding solar activity, and for the first time, provided the explanations for the long cycle of solar activity in an explicit form. We also found that the decay of near-Earth plasma pressure is proportional to r^2 to Earth, where subsequent mathematical derivations are consistent with satellite data from another independent study. Moreover, we found physical formulas that can describe the relationships between emission lines in the extreme ultraviolet spectrum of the Sun, temperatures, electron densities, and magnetic fields. The formula obtained is consistent with the properties that physicists had previously hypothesized it should possess.