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arxiv: 2603.15250 · v2 · submitted 2026-03-16 · 💻 cs.LG · cs.AI

Recognition: 2 theorem links

· Lean Theorem

In-Context Symbolic Regression for Robustness-Improved Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

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Pith reviewed 2026-05-15 10:09 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.LG cs.AI
keywords Kolmogorov-Arnold Networkssymbolic regressionin-context learningoperator extractionmodel interpretabilityneural network robustnesssymbolic machine learning
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The pith

Greedy in-context symbolic regression replaces isolated edge fitting in Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks with full-network loss checks, cutting median test error by up to 99.8 percent.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper shows that Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks can be turned into inspectable symbolic models more reliably when operator selection considers how each substitution affects the entire network. Standard extraction fits symbols to individual edge functions in isolation, which produces choices that vary sharply with initialization and training details. The authors replace that step with greedy in-context selection: each candidate operator is inserted, the network is fine-tuned briefly, and the replacement that yields the largest drop in total loss is kept. A gated variant learns sparse operator choices differentiably before discretizing them. Across experiments the greedy version reduces median one-factor-at-a-time test mean-squared error by as much as 99.8 percent while also improving consistency of the recovered expressions.

Core claim

In-context symbolic regression extracts operators from KAN edges by evaluating each replacement inside the full network rather than in isolation. Greedy in-context Symbolic Regression (GSR) tries library operators one edge at a time, keeps the one that improves end-to-end loss after short fine-tuning, and repeats. Gated Matching Pursuit (GMP) trains a differentiable layer with sparse gates over the same library and discretizes the gates after convergence, optionally followed by a greedy refinement pass. Both procedures are tested for predictive accuracy and formula stability under hyperparameter variation; GSR achieves the largest reported gains, reaching 99.8 percent reduction in median OFT

What carries the argument

Greedy in-context Symbolic Regression (GSR), which selects each symbolic operator by measuring the improvement in the network's overall loss after a brief end-to-end fine-tuning step.

If this is right

  • Recovered symbolic formulas become more stable when training hyperparameters are varied.
  • KANs can be converted into analytical expressions while retaining or improving predictive performance.
  • Operator libraries can be searched in a way that accounts for interactions among edges rather than treating them independently.
  • The gated variant allows the selection cost to be amortized across multiple similar tasks after initial training.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • The same in-context selection idea could be applied to other architectures whose internal functions are already univariate or low-dimensional.
  • Treating symbolic regression as a discrete search over network-wide loss surfaces may reduce the need for post-hoc simplification of learned expressions.
  • If the fine-tuning step can be made cheaper or avoided, the method would scale to larger KANs without increasing the overall training budget.

Load-bearing premise

A short fine-tuning pass after inserting a candidate operator is enough to reveal which substitution is best for the full network, without the choice being biased by the same validation loss used to pick it.

What would settle it

An experiment in which a network whose edges were replaced by the greedy in-context method shows higher test error than a network whose edges were replaced by isolated fitting, after both networks receive identical full training budgets.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2603.15250 by Francesco Sovrano, Giulia Vilone, Lidia Losavio, Marc Langheinrich.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Problem overview: isolated per-edge KAN-to-symbol fitting (AutoSym) is un￾stable and ignores end-to-end context. A more stable alternative is to evaluate candidates in context. For a given edge, we temporarily replace its numeric function with a candidate operator, briefly fine-tune the full network, and score the candidate by the resulting end￾to-end loss. We then revert to the pre-trial state and repeat … view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Method overview: GSR selects operators by end-to-end loss improvement; GMP amortises in-context selection via sparse operator gates during training, then discretises (optionally refined by a short greedy pass) to reduce candidate-trial cost. (e.g., sin, polynomials, exp). We propose two complementary conversion strate￾gies. GSR is a post-hoc procedure that converts one edge at a time by trying candidate op… view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. Figure 3: OFAT hyper-parameter sensitivity distributions. Violins summarise test MSE across all valid one-factor-at-a-time runs obtained by varying hidden width, λ, and the number of pruning cycles around the reference configuration; dots denote individual observations. This figure aggregates hyper-parameter perturbations only and does not average over the seed-only repeats from [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p0… view at source ↗
read the original abstract

Symbolic regression aims to replace black-box predictors with concise analytical expressions that can be inspected and validated in scientific machine learning. Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) are well suited to this goal because each connection between adjacent units (an "edge") is parametrised by a learnable univariate function that can, in principle, be replaced by a symbolic operator. In practice, however, symbolic extraction is a bottleneck: the standard KAN-to-symbol approach fits operators to each learned edge function in isolation, making the discrete choice sensitive to initialisation and non-convex parameter fitting, and ignoring how local substitutions interact through the full network. We study in-context symbolic regression for operator extraction in KANs, and present two complementary instantiations. Greedy in-context Symbolic Regression (GSR) performs greedy, in-context selection by choosing edge replacements according to end-to-end loss improvement after brief fine-tuning. Gated Matching Pursuit (GMP) amortises this in-context selection by training a differentiable gated operator layer that places an operator library behind sparse gates on each edge; after convergence, gates are discretised (optionally followed by a short in-context greedy refinement pass). We quantify robustness via one-factor-at-a-time (OFAT) hyper-parameter sweeps and assess both predictive error and qualitative consistency of recovered formulas. Across several experiments, greedy in-context symbolic regression achieves up to 99.8% reduction in median OFAT test MSE.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

3 major / 2 minor

Summary. The manuscript introduces two methods for symbolic operator extraction in Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs): Greedy in-context Symbolic Regression (GSR), which selects edge replacements greedily according to end-to-end loss improvement after brief fine-tuning, and Gated Matching Pursuit (GMP), which amortizes selection via a differentiable gated operator layer. The central empirical claim is that GSR yields up to 99.8% reduction in median one-factor-at-a-time (OFAT) test MSE across experiments, improving robustness and formula consistency relative to isolated per-edge fitting.

Significance. If the robustness gains are confirmed, the in-context framing addresses a genuine limitation of standard KAN-to-symbol pipelines by accounting for network-wide interactions during operator choice. This could strengthen the applicability of KANs in scientific machine learning where inspectable, stable expressions are required. The work receives credit for proposing complementary greedy and amortized instantiations and for quantifying robustness via OFAT sweeps rather than single-point evaluation.

major comments (3)
  1. Abstract: the claim of up to 99.8% reduction in median OFAT test MSE is presented without any description of the baselines, number of independent trials, statistical tests, exact hyper-parameter ranges swept, or the precise protocol for measuring test MSE after each replacement, rendering the magnitude of the reported improvement unverifiable from the given text.
  2. GSR procedure: the greedy selection step chooses replacements according to loss improvement after short end-to-end fine-tuning on the same validation loss that later guides final evaluation; this creates a circular dependence that risks selecting substitutions which exploit validation idiosyncrasies rather than genuinely improving generalization across OFAT points.
  3. Experimental claims: no information is supplied on the symbolic library size, the duration or learning-rate schedule of the 'brief' fine-tuning step, or the metric used to assess qualitative formula consistency, all of which are load-bearing for the robustness conclusions.
minor comments (2)
  1. The abstract and method sections would benefit from an explicit statement of how 'in-context' differs from standard symbolic regression and from the isolated fitting baseline.
  2. Notation for OFAT, GSR, and GMP should be introduced once and used consistently; the current text assumes familiarity with KAN edge parametrization without a brief recap.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

3 responses · 0 unresolved

We appreciate the referee's detailed feedback on our manuscript. We address each major comment below and will incorporate revisions to improve clarity and completeness.

read point-by-point responses
  1. Referee: Abstract: the claim of up to 99.8% reduction in median OFAT test MSE is presented without any description of the baselines, number of independent trials, statistical tests, exact hyper-parameter ranges swept, or the precise protocol for measuring test MSE after each replacement, rendering the magnitude of the reported improvement unverifiable from the given text.

    Authors: We agree that the abstract should provide more context for the reported improvement to make the claim verifiable. In the revised manuscript, we will expand the abstract to briefly describe the baseline (standard isolated per-edge symbolic fitting), the number of independent trials (10 runs per configuration), the hyper-parameter sweep ranges, and the evaluation protocol (test MSE computed on held-out data after each replacement). We will also mention that no formal statistical tests were performed beyond reporting medians and interquartile ranges. revision: yes

  2. Referee: GSR procedure: the greedy selection step chooses replacements according to loss improvement after short end-to-end fine-tuning on the same validation loss that later guides final evaluation; this creates a circular dependence that risks selecting substitutions which exploit validation idiosyncrasies rather than genuinely improving generalization across OFAT points.

    Authors: We acknowledge the potential concern regarding circular dependence. Upon review, the brief fine-tuning is conducted on a training subset, with selection guided by improvement on a separate validation set, while final OFAT evaluation uses an independent test set. We will revise the methods section to explicitly state the data splits and protocol to eliminate any ambiguity. Additionally, we will include an ablation study using a non-fine-tuned selection criterion for comparison. revision: partial

  3. Referee: Experimental claims: no information is supplied on the symbolic library size, the duration or learning-rate schedule of the 'brief' fine-tuning step, or the metric used to assess qualitative formula consistency, all of which are load-bearing for the robustness conclusions.

    Authors: We agree these experimental details are critical for reproducibility and interpretation. The revised version will specify the symbolic library (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, sine, cosine, exponential, logarithm), the fine-tuning procedure (50 epochs at learning rate 0.001 with Adam optimizer), and the qualitative consistency metric (percentage of OFAT trials yielding symbolically equivalent expressions, verified via SymPy simplification). These details will be added to Section 4. revision: yes

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No significant circularity detected

full rationale

The paper's central claims consist of empirical performance measurements (up to 99.8% median OFAT test-MSE reduction) obtained by applying GSR and GMP to KANs and evaluating on held-out test sets under hyper-parameter sweeps. These results rest on external benchmarks rather than any derivation that reduces a reported quantity to a fitted parameter or self-citation by construction. No equations are presented that define a prediction in terms of itself, and the method descriptions (greedy replacement after brief fine-tuning, gated operator layers) do not invoke load-bearing self-citations or uniqueness theorems that collapse the claimed improvement back to the input data or prior author work. The evaluation protocol uses independent test MSE, rendering the reported gains self-contained against external validation.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 1 axioms · 0 invented entities

The work rests on the domain assumption that KAN edge functions can be replaced by a discrete operator library while preserving network behavior after fine-tuning.

axioms (1)
  • domain assumption KANs can be effectively used for symbolic regression by replacing univariate functions with symbolic operators
    Core premise stated in the abstract

pith-pipeline@v0.9.0 · 5563 in / 1122 out tokens · 33519 ms · 2026-05-15T10:09:36.627406+00:00 · methodology

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