期刊名称:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN:0027-8424
电子版ISSN:1091-6490
出版年度:2022
卷号:119
期号:32
DOI:10.1073/pnas.2123433119
语种:English
出版社:The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要:Significance
We demonstrate that a neural network automatically solves, explains, and generates university-level problems from the largest Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) mathematics courses at a human level. Our methods combine three innovations: 1) using recent neural networks pretrained on text and fine-tuned on code rather than pretrained on text; 2) few-shot learning synthesizing programs that correctly solve course problems automatically; and 3) a pipeline to solve questions, explain solutions, and generate new questions indistinguishable by students from course questions. Our 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. Implications for higher education include roles of artificial intelligence (AI) in automated course evaluation and content generation.
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.