Respecting causality is all you need for training physics-informed neural networks
Authors: Sifan Wang, Shyam Sankaran, Paris Perdikaris
AI-generated Key Points
- Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are used for simulating complex physical systems
- PINN models have difficulty accurately simulating dynamical systems that exhibit multi-scale, chaotic or turbulent behavior
- Researchers proposed a re-formulation of PINN loss functions that explicitly account for physical causality during model training
- This modification introduced significant accuracy improvements and provided a practical quantitative mechanism for assessing the convergence of a PINN model
- The modified PINNs demonstrated state-of-the-art numerical results across several benchmarks where existing formulations fail, including the chaotic Lorenz system, the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation in the chaotic regime, and the Navier-Stokes equations in the turbulent regime
- Respecting causality is fundamental to accurately simulating physical systems and overcoming challenges that currently limit the success of PINNs to relatively simple problems
- Classical numerical methods typically discretize PDEs sequentially over time using algorithms that ensure full resolution at each time step before approximating subsequent steps
- Respecting causality can significantly improve the accuracy and applicability of PINNs to problems with industrial complexity.
- These findings could pave the way for further advancements in physics-informed machine learning techniques.
Abstract: While the popularity of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) is steadily rising, to this date PINNs have not been successful in simulating dynamical systems whose solution exhibits multi-scale, chaotic or turbulent behavior. In this work we attribute this shortcoming to the inability of existing PINNs formulations to respect the spatio-temporal causal structure that is inherent to the evolution of physical systems. We argue that this is a fundamental limitation and a key source of error that can ultimately steer PINN models to converge towards erroneous solutions. We address this pathology by proposing a simple re-formulation of PINNs loss functions that can explicitly account for physical causality during model training. We demonstrate that this simple modification alone is enough to introduce significant accuracy improvements, as well as a practical quantitative mechanism for assessing the convergence of a PINNs model. We provide state-of-the-art numerical results across a series of benchmarks for which existing PINNs formulations fail, including the chaotic Lorenz system, the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation in the chaotic regime, and the Navier-Stokes equations in the turbulent regime. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that PINNs have been successful in simulating such systems, introducing new opportunities for their applicability to problems of industrial complexity.
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