Physics-informed neural networks with residual/gradient-based adaptive sampling methods for solving PDEs with sharp solutions

Abstract: We consider solving the forward and inverse PDEs which have sharp solutions using physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) in this work. In particular, to better capture the sharpness of the solution, we propose adaptive sampling methods (ASMs) based on the residual and the gradient of the solution. We first present a residual only based ASM algorithm denoted by ASM I. In this approach, we first train the neural network by using a small number of residual points and divide the computational domain into a certain number of sub-domains, we then add new residual points in the sub-domain which has the largest mean absolute value of the residual, and those points which have largest absolute values of the residual in this sub-domain will be added as new residual points. We further develop a second type of ASM algorithm (denoted by ASM II) based on both the residual and the gradient of the solution due to the fact that only the residual may be not able to efficiently capture the sharpness of the solution. The procedure of ASM II is almost the same as that of ASM I except that in ASM II, we add new residual points which not only have large residual but also large gradient. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the present methods, we employ both ASM I and ASM II to solve a number of PDEs, including Burger equation, compressible Euler equation, Poisson equation over an L-shape domain as well as high-dimensional Poisson equation. It has been shown from the numerical results that the sharp solutions can be well approximated by using either ASM I or ASM II algorithm, and both methods deliver much more accurate solution than original PINNs with the same number of residual points. Moreover, the ASM II algorithm has better performance in terms of accuracy, efficiency and stability compared with the ASM I algorithm.