FOSSA: First-Order Optimality-Based Sensor Selection for PINN Inverse Problems, with Application to Electrocardiographic Imaging

Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a powerful framework for modeling physical systems and solving inverse problems. In such settings, sensors are deployed to capture observable system responses; however, the quality of reconstruction critically depends on how these sensors are selected. Existing sensor selection strategies for PINNs are closely related to active learning and experimental design, typically relying on iterative refinement schemes that sequentially add sensors and retrain the model. While effective under limited data regimes, these approaches incur substantial computational cost due to repeated retraining and primarily focus on selecting subsets of sensors, without providing a global characterization of sensor importance. In this work, we propose FOSSA, a first-order optimality-based sensor selection algorithm for inverse PINNs. Unlike existing methods, FOSSA evaluates sensor importance in a post-training manner, requiring only a single trained PINN. FOSSA assigns importance scores to all candidate sensing locations based on the first-order optimality condition at convergence. To improve robustness, a refinement scheme is further proposed to handle instability in the inverse solver. FOSSA facilitates a global assessment of the contribution of each sensor to reconstruction. We validate the proposed approach on the inverse electrocardiography (ECG) modeling and show that not all sensors contribute positively to predictive performance. Incorporating low-importance sensors can, in fact, degrade reconstruction accuracy. These findings highlight the need for principled sensor importance evaluation and provide a scalable pathway for guiding sensor deployment in physics-informed inverse modeling.