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Poster

Lyapunov functions: a long-standing open problem in mathematics, with symbolic transformers

Alberto Alfarano · Francois Charton · Amaury Hayat

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Wed 11 Dec 11 a.m. PST — 2 p.m. PST

Abstract:

Despite their spectacular progress, language models still struggle on complex reasoning tasks, such as advanced mathematics.We consider a long-standing open problem in mathematics: discovering the Lyapunov function that controls the global stability of a dynamical system. This problem has no known general solution, and algorithmic solvers only exist for some small polynomial systems.We propose a new method for generating synthetic training samples from random solutions, and show that sequence-to-sequence transformers trained on such datasets perform better than algorithmic solvers and humans on polynomial systems, and can discover new Lyapunov functions for non-polynomial systems.

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