Automatic Ordinary Differential Equations Discovery For Biological Systems Using Large Language Model Powered Agentic System
For computational biologists, MEDA automates the discovery of mechanistic ODE models from data and background knowledge, though the approach is incremental over existing LLM and SR methods.
The paper introduces MEDA, an LLM- and SR-powered agentic system for discovering ODE models of biological systems. It achieves strong structural recovery in canonical model retrieval and extrapolation tasks, producing biologically plausible models.
Automatic scientific discovery has long been a goal of computational scholars - a machine that can discover nature's secrets on its own, moving computational systems beyond data-fitting tools toward the generation and refinement of mechanistic models of the universe. Recent advances in symbolic regression (SR) and large-language-model (LLM)-based agents suggest that such systems can recover equations from data, incorporate domain priors, and automate parts of the research workflow. However, most existing approaches either focus on narrow equation-discovery benchmarks or broad end-to-end automation pipelines, while biological systems remain comparatively underexplored. Here, we introduce the MEDA system, an LLM- and SR-powered agentic framework for discovering ordinary-differential-equation (ODE) models of biological and biologically inspired dynamical systems. MEDA retrieves background knowledge, defines admissible variables, generates mechanistic constraints, proposes candidate ODEs, and fits and evaluates them. We evaluate it across canonical model retrieval, reasoning-based extrapolation to unseen variants, and open-ended discovery, with and without experimental data. Across these settings, MEDA recovered the correct state variables, achieved strong structural recovery in retrieval and extrapolation tasks, and produced biologically plausible discovery-oriented models. Ablation and robustness analyses show that knowledge-guided formalization and mechanistic constraints are load-bearing components, whereas numerical fitting alone can preserve trajectory-compatible but biologically incorrect equations.