Paper Detail

Machine Collective Intelligence for Explainable Scientific Discovery

Gyoung S. Na, Chanyoung Park

arxiv Score 12.2

Published 2026-04-30 · First seen 2026-05-01

Research Track A · General AI

Abstract

Deriving governing equations from empirical observations is a longstanding challenge in science. Although artificial intelligence (AI) has demonstrated substantial capabilities in function approximation, the discovery of explainable and extrapolatable equations remains a fundamental limitation of modern AI, posing a central bottleneck for AI-driven scientific discovery. Here, we present machine collective intelligence, a unified paradigm that integrates two fundamental yet distinct traditions in computational intelligence--symbolism and metaheuristics--to enable autonomous and evolutionary discovery of governing equations. It orchestrates multiple reasoning agents to evolve their symbolic hypotheses through coordinated generation, evaluation, critique, and consolidation, enabling scientific discovery beyond single-agent inference. Across scientific systems governed by deterministic, stochastic, or previously uncharacterized dynamics, machine collective intelligence autonomously recovered the underlying governing equations without relying on hand-crafted domain knowledge. Furthermore, the resulting equations reduced extrapolation error by up to six orders of magnitude relative to deep neural networks, while condensing 0.5-1 million model parameters into just 5-40 interpretable parameters. This study marks an important shift in AI toward the autonomous discovery of principled scientific equations.

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BibTeX

@article{na2026machine,
  title = {Machine Collective Intelligence for Explainable Scientific Discovery},
  author = {Gyoung S. Na and Chanyoung Park},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Deriving governing equations from empirical observations is a longstanding challenge in science. Although artificial intelligence (AI) has demonstrated substantial capabilities in function approximation, the discovery of explainable and extrapolatable equations remains a fundamental limitation of modern AI, posing a central bottleneck for AI-driven scientific discovery. Here, we present machine collective intelligence, a unified paradigm that integrates two fundamental yet distinct traditions in},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27297},
  keywords = {cs.AI, physics.comp-ph},
  eprint = {2604.27297},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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