An Expert's Guide to Training Physics-informed Neural Networks
Sifan Wang Shyam Sankaran Hanwen Wang Paris Perdikaris
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have been popularized as a deep
learning framework that can seamlessly synthesize observational data and
partial differential equation (PDE) constraints. Their practical effectiveness
however can be hampered by training pathologies, but also oftentimes by poor
choices made by users who lack deep learning expertise. In this paper we
present a series of best practices that can significantly improve the training
efficiency and overall accuracy of PINNs. We also put forth a series of
challenging benchmark problems that highlight some of the most prominent
difficulties in training PINNs, and present comprehensive and fully
reproducible ablation studies that demonstrate how different architecture
choices and training strategies affect the test accuracy of the resulting
models. We show that the methods and guiding principles put forth in this study
lead to state-of-the-art results and provide strong baselines that future
studies should use for comparison purposes. To this end, we also release a
highly optimized library in JAX that can be used to reproduce all results
reported in this paper, enable future research studies, as well as facilitate
easy adaptation to new use-case scenarios.