Bridging the Gap Between Scientific Laws Derived by AI Systems and Canonical Knowledge via Abductive Inference with AI Noether
Preprint
- 7 January 2026
- preprint
- Published by Springer Nature in Research Square
Abstract
Advances in AI have shown great potential in contributing to the acceleration of scientific discovery. Symbolic regression can fit interpretable models to data, but these models are not necessarily derivable from established theory. Recent systems (e.g., AI-Descartes, AI-Hilbert) enforce derivability from prior knowledge. However, when existing theories are incomplete or incorrect, these machine-generated hypotheses may fall outside the theoretical scope. Automatically finding corrections to axiom systems to close this gap remains a central challenge in scientific discovery. We propose a solution: an open-source algebraic geometry-based system that, given an incomplete axiom system expressible as polynomials and a hypothesis that the axioms cannot derive, generates a minimal set of candidate axioms that, when added to the theory, provably derive the (possibly noisy) hypothesis. We illustrate the efficacy of our approach by showing that it can reconstruct key axioms required to derive the carrier-resolved photo-Hall effect, Einstein's relativistic laws, and several other laws.Keywords
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