Discovering Abstract Symbolic Relations by Learning Unitary Group Representations

We investigate a principled approach for symbolic operation completion (SOC), a minimal task for studying symbolic reasoning. While conceptually similar to matrix completion, SOC poses a unique challenge in modeling abstract relationships between discrete symbols. We demonstrate that SOC can be efficiently solved by a minimal model - a bilinear map - with a novel factorized architecture. Inspired by group representation theory, this architecture leverages matrix embeddings of symbols, modeling each symbol as an operator that dynamically influences others. Our model achieves perfect test accuracy on SOC with comparable or superior sample efficiency to Transformer baselines across most datasets, while boasting significantly faster learning speeds (100-1000×). Crucially, the model exhibits an implicit bias towards learning general group structures, precisely discovering the unitary representations of underlying groups. This remarkable property not only confers interpretability but also significant implications for automatic symmetry discovery in geometric deep learning. Overall, our work establishes group theory as a powerful guiding principle for discovering abstract algebraic structures in deep learning, and showcases matrix representations as a compelling alternative to traditional vector embeddings for modeling symbolic relationships.