A neural network solves, explains, and generates university math problems by program synthesis and few-shot learning at human level
Article Status
Published
Authors/contributors
- Drori, Iddo (Author)
- Zhang, Sarah (Author)
- Shuttleworth, Reece (Author)
- Tang, Leonard (Author)
- Lu, Albert (Author)
- Ke, Elizabeth (Author)
- Liu, Kevin (Author)
- Chen, Linda (Author)
- Tran, Sunny (Author)
- Cheng, Newman (Author)
- Wang, Roman (Author)
- Singh, Nikhil (Author)
- Patti, Taylor L. (Author)
- Lynch, Jayson (Author)
- Shporer, Avi (Author)
- Verma, Nakul (Author)
- Wu, Eugene (Author)
- Strang, Gilbert (Author)
Title
A neural network solves, explains, and generates university math problems by program synthesis and few-shot learning at human level
Abstract
We demonstrate that a neural network pretrained on text and fine-tuned on code solves mathematics course problems, explains solutions, and generates questions at a human level. We automatically synthesize programs using few-shot learning and OpenAI’s Codex transformer and execute them to solve course problems at 81% automatic accuracy. We curate a dataset of questions from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s largest mathematics courses (Single Variable and Multivariable Calculus, Differential Equations, Introduction to Probability and Statistics, Linear Algebra, and Mathematics for Computer Science) and Columbia University’s Computational Linear Algebra. We solve questions from a MATH dataset (on Prealgebra, Algebra, Counting and Probability, Intermediate Algebra, Number Theory, and Precalculus), the latest benchmark of advanced mathematics problems designed to assess mathematical reasoning. We randomly sample questions and generate solutions with multiple modalities, including numbers, equations, and plots. The latest GPT-3 language model pretrained on text automatically solves only 18.8% of these university questions using zero-shot learning and 30.8% using few-shot learning and the most recent chain of thought prompting. In contrast, program synthesis with few-shot learning using Codex fine-tuned on code generates programs that automatically solve 81% of these questions. Our approach improves the previous state-of-the-art automatic solution accuracy on the benchmark topics from 8.8 to 81.1%. We perform a survey to evaluate the quality and difficulty of generated questions. This work automatically solves university-level mathematics course questions at a human level and explains and generates university-level mathematics course questions at scale, a milestone for higher education.
Publication
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Volume
119
Issue
32
Pages
e2123433119
Date
2022-8-2
Journal Abbr
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.
Language
en
ISSN
0027-8424
Accessed
26/06/2024, 19:19
Library Catalogue
DOI.org (Crossref)
Extra
Citation Key: drori2022
<标题>: 神经网络通过程序综合和少量示例学习,以人类水平解决、解释和生成大学数学问题
<AI Smry>: This work solves university-level mathematics courses and improves upon state-of-the-art, increasing automatic accuracy on randomly sampled questions on a benchmark by order of magnitude.
Citation
Drori, I., Zhang, S., Shuttleworth, R., Tang, L., Lu, A., Ke, E., Liu, K., Chen, L., Tran, S., Cheng, N., Wang, R., Singh, N., Patti, T. L., Lynch, J., Shporer, A., Verma, N., Wu, E., & Strang, G. (2022). A neural network solves, explains, and generates university math problems by program synthesis and few-shot learning at human level. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(32), e2123433119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2123433119
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