Physics-guided generative adversarial network to learn physical models

Abstract: This short note describes the concept of guided training of deep neural networks (DNNs) to learn physically reasonable solutions. DNNs are being widely used to predict phenomena in physics and mechanics. One of the issues of DNNs is that their output does not always satisfy physical equations. One approach to consider physical equations is adding a residual of equations into the loss function; this is called physics-informed neural network (PINN). One feature of PINNs is that the physical equations and corresponding residual must be implemented as part of a neural network model. In addition, the residual does not always converge to a small value. The proposed model is a physics-guided generative adversarial network (PG-GAN) that uses a GAN architecture in which physical equations are used to judge whether the neural network's output is consistent with physics. The proposed method was applied to a simple problem to assess its potential usability.