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The MEDA system leverages large language models and symbolic regression to autonomously discover ordinary differential equations (ODEs) for biological systems, advancing beyond traditional data-fitting methods. This framework not only retrieves relevant background knowledge but also generates mechanistic constraints and evaluates candidate ODEs, demonstrating its effectiveness across various tasks including model retrieval and extrapolation. Key results indicate that MEDA successfully identifies correct state variables and produces biologically plausible models, highlighting the importance of knowledge-guided formalization in the discovery process.
MEDA reveals that integrating domain knowledge and mechanistic constraints is crucial for accurately discovering biological models, outperforming traditional numerical fitting methods.
Automatic scientific discovery has long been a goal of computational scholars - a machine that can discover nature's secrets on its own, moving computational systems beyond data-fitting tools toward the generation and refinement of mechanistic models of the universe. Recent advances in symbolic regression (SR) and large-language-model (LLM)-based agents suggest that such systems can recover equations from data, incorporate domain priors, and automate parts of the research workflow. However, most existing approaches either focus on narrow equation-discovery benchmarks or broad end-to-end automation pipelines, while biological systems remain comparatively underexplored. Here, we introduce the MEDA system, an LLM- and SR-powered agentic framework for discovering ordinary-differential-equation (ODE) models of biological and biologically inspired dynamical systems. MEDA retrieves background knowledge, defines admissible variables, generates mechanistic constraints, proposes candidate ODEs, and fits and evaluates them. We evaluate it across canonical model retrieval, reasoning-based extrapolation to unseen variants, and open-ended discovery, with and without experimental data. Across these settings, MEDA recovered the correct state variables, achieved strong structural recovery in retrieval and extrapolation tasks, and produced biologically plausible discovery-oriented models. Ablation and robustness analyses show that knowledge-guided formalization and mechanistic constraints are load-bearing components, whereas numerical fitting alone can preserve trajectory-compatible but biologically incorrect equations.
