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Characterizing possible failure modes in physics-informed neural networks

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arxiv 2109.01050 v2 pith:6RPRGXPQ submitted 2021-09-02 cs.LG cs.AIcs.NAmath.NAphysics.comp-ph

classification cs.LGcs.AIcs.NAmath.NAphysics.comp-ph
keywords learningpinnapproachfailurelossmodesphysicalproblems
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Recent work in scientific machine learning has developed so-called physics-informed neural network (PINN) models. The typical approach is to incorporate physical domain knowledge as soft constraints on an empirical loss function and use existing machine learning methodologies to train the model. We demonstrate that, while existing PINN methodologies can learn good models for relatively trivial problems, they can easily fail to learn relevant physical phenomena for even slightly more complex problems. In particular, we analyze several distinct situations of widespread physical interest, including learning differential equations with convection, reaction, and diffusion operators. We provide evidence that the soft regularization in PINNs, which involves PDE-based differential operators, can introduce a number of subtle problems, including making the problem more ill-conditioned. Importantly, we show that these possible failure modes are not due to the lack of expressivity in the NN architecture, but that the PINN's setup makes the loss landscape very hard to optimize. We then describe two promising solutions to address these failure modes. The first approach is to use curriculum regularization, where the PINN's loss term starts from a simple PDE regularization, and becomes progressively more complex as the NN gets trained. The second approach is to pose the problem as a sequence-to-sequence learning task, rather than learning to predict the entire space-time at once. Extensive testing shows that we can achieve up to 1-2 orders of magnitude lower error with these methods as compared to regular PINN training.

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Forward citations

Cited by 9 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. OpenAlex reports about 115 citations worldwide. Full citation record

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  2. Diagnosing Failure Modes of Neural Operators Across Diverse PDE Families

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    A single-architecture empirical study reports degradation factors up to ~18 for neural PDE solvers under distribution shift, but its headline 'architecture-dependent failure patterns' claim is not backed by the experi...

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    LieSolver fits initial/boundary data with linear combinations of Lie-symmetry-generated base solutions, enforcing linear homogeneous PDEs exactly by construction.

  4. LIGO-PINN: Learned Initialization via Gated Optimization to Alleviate Convergence Failures in Physics Informed Neural Networks

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Meta-learning on easy PDE tasks plus a layer-wise gating schedule reduces extrapolation error by about 91% relative to six PINN baselines on hard convection, Helmholtz, and Navier-Stokes benchmarks.

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    The Multi-Head Neural Operator predicts full phase-field trajectories in a single forward pass using time-specific projection heads with temporal connections, and outperforms FNO-2d and FNO-3d on five benchmark equations.

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    A composite operator neural network predicts 3D unsteady flow and particle concentrations in a stormwater separator, matching CFD closely on most held-out storm events.

  7. Drag modelling for flows through assemblies of spherical particles with machine learning: A comparison of approaches

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    Applying genetic programming to outputs of a graph neural network yields compact symbolic drag-variation formulas at Reynolds numbers up to 280, though with lower accuracy than the network.

  8. Breaking the Precision Ceiling in Physics-Informed Neural Networks: A Hybrid Fourier-Neural Architecture for Ultra-High Accuracy

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  9. Towards Digital Twins for Optimal Radioembolization

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