MRF-PINN: A Multi-Receptive-Field convolutional physics-informed neural network for solving partial differential equations

Abstract: Compared with conventional numerical approaches to solving partial differential equations (PDEs), physics-informed neural networks (PINN) have manifested the capability to save development effort and computational cost, especially in scenarios of reconstructing the physics field and solving the inverse problem. Considering the advantages of parameter sharing, spatial feature extraction and low inference cost, convolutional neural networks (CNN) are increasingly used in PINN. However, some challenges still remain as follows. To adapt convolutional PINN to solve different PDEs, considerable effort is usually needed for tuning critical hyperparameters. Furthermore, the effects of the finite difference accuracy, and the mesh resolution on the predictivity of convolutional PINN are not settled. To fill the gaps above, we propose three initiatives in this paper: (1) A Multi-Receptive-Field PINN (MRF-PINN) model is established to solve different types of PDEs on various mesh resolutions without manual tuning; (2) The dimensional balance method is used to estimate the loss weights when solving Navier-Stokes equations; (3) The Taylor polynomial is used to pad the virtual nodes near the boundaries for implementing high-order finite difference. The proposed MRF-PINN is tested for solving three typical linear PDEs (elliptic, parabolic, hyperbolic) and a series of nonlinear PDEs (Navier-Stokes PDEs) to demonstrate its generality and superiority. This paper shows that MRF-PINN can adapt to completely different equation types and mesh resolutions without any hyperparameter tuning. The dimensional balance method saves computational time and improves the convergence for solving Navier-Stokes PDEs. Further, the solving error is significantly decreased under high-order finite difference, large channel number, and high mesh resolution, which is expected to be a general convolutional PINN scheme.