Organizations: School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China · Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China · Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · School of Robotics and Advanced Manufacture, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China
Several complex physical systems are governed by multi-scale partial differential equations (PDEs) that exhibit both smooth low-frequency components and localized high-frequency structures. Existing physics-informed neural network (PINN) methods typically train with fixed coordinate system inputs, where geometric misalignment with these structures induces gradient stiffness and ill-conditioning that hinder convergence. To address this issue, we introduce a mapping paradigm that reshapes the input coordinates through differentiable geometric compactification mappings and couples the geometric structure of PDEs with the spectral properties of residual operators. Based on this paradigm, we propose Geometric Compactification (GC)-PINN, a framework that introduces three mapping strategies for periodic boundaries, far-field scale expansion, and localized singular structures in the input domain without modifying the underlying PINN architecture. Extensive empirical evaluation demonstrates that this approach yields more uniform residual distributions and higher solution accuracy on representative 1D and 2D PDEs, while improving training stability and convergence speed.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Conceptual comparison of standard PINNs and the proposed GC-PINN. Existing PINNs operate on the original Euclidean geometry, leading to unstable spectral conditioning and training. GC-PINN introduces a geometric compactification mapping paradigm that transforms the input domain, resulting in stable spectral properties and accelerated convergence while preserving predictive accuracy.
Figure 2: Coordinate distributions under the three mappings.
Figure 3: Overview of the GC-PINN pipeline. Physical domain coordinates are transformed via a learnable geometric compactification mapping and subsequently fed into an MLP backbone for solution prediction. The PDE residuals are computed through automatic differentiation, enabling end-to-end training of both the mapping parameters and the network weights.
PDE
Metric
GC-Torus
GC-Radial
GC-Local
gPINN
RAR
FF
SA
PINN
1D Burgers
MSE
3.25E-10
8.69E-11
1.69E-10
1.73E-10
1.96E-10
2.65E-09
5.13E-10
3.14E-09
RelL2
2.44E-05
1.26E-05
1.76E-05
1.78E-05
1.90E-05
6.97E-05
3.07E-05
7.59E-05
RelH1
3.97E-05
1.18E-04
9.15E-05
4.22E-05
6.16E-05
8.07E-05
8.51E-05
3.91E-04
1D Conv-Diff
MSE
3.99E-06
6.00E-06
9.32E-08
1.96E-04
2.27E-06
1.39E-06
7.91E-07
2.43E-04
RelL2
2.00E-03
2.45E-03
3.06E-04
1.40E-02
1.51E-03
1.18E-03
8.90E-04
1.56E-02
RelH1
2.16E-03
3.55E-03
6.66E-04
1.57E-02
1.06E-03
5.15E-04
1.08E-03
1.57E-02
Table 1: Performance comparison across benchmark PDEs. (GC-* denote GC-PINN with Torus Mapping, Radial Mapping, and Local Stretching; RAR, FF, SA denote PINN+RAR, FF-PINN, and SA-PINN. PDE names are also abbreviated.)
Figure 4: Comparison between predicted and ground-truth solutions for the 2D Navier-Stokes equation.
Figure 5: Training convergence on five PDE benchmark tasks, measured by the evolution of RelL2 ..
Parameter β
Parameter α
β
MSE
Rel L2
α
MSE
Rel L2
5
1.09E-09
4.47E-05
10
1.46E-09
5.19E-05
10
3.58E-09
8.11E-05
20
8.17E-10
3.87E-05
15
2.69E-10
2.22E-05
30
4.60E-10
2.91E-05
20
1.69E-10
1.76E-05
40
3.44E-10
2.51E-05
25
2.08E-10
1.95E-05
50
8.69E-11
1.26E-05
Table 2: Parameter sensitivity result for the 1D Burgers equation.
Figure 6: Visualization of the error distribution of predicted solutions for the 1D Burgers equation.
Appendix figures & tables11 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 7: Spectral analysis of residual neural tangent kernels under geometric compactification. (a) Eigenvalue distribution of the kernel matrix after training convergence. (b) Temporal evolution of the effective rank during training.
Figure 8: Comparison of heatmaps of residual NTK kernel matrices.
1D Convection-Diffusion Equation
Parameter α
Parameter β
Param
MSE
Rel L2
Rel H1
Param
MSE
Rel L2
Rel H1
5
8.22E-06
2.87E-03
2.99E-03
10
6.66E-06
2.58E-03
1.21E-03
10
6.22E-06
2.50E-03
6.05E-03
20
5.66E-06
2.38E-03
2.02E-03
15
6.07E-06
2.47E-03
1.34E-02
30
2.22E-06
1.49E-03
5.35E-04
20
9.32E-08
3.06E-04
6.66E-04
40
2.01E-07
4.49E-04
2.07E-04
Appendix
Table 3: Parameter sensitivity analysis for the 1D convection-diffusion and 2D Navier-Stokes equations
Problem
Mapping Method
MSE
RelL2
RelH1
1D Burgers
Torus Mapping
3.25E-10
2.44E-05
3.97E-05
Radial Mapping
8.69E-11
1.26E-05
1.18E-04
Local Stretching
1.69E-10
1.76E-05
9.15E-05
Saturating Mapping
2.75E-01
7.11E-01
8.33E-01
PWL Mapping
2.56E-06
2.17E-03
1.57E-03
1D Convection- Diffusion
Torus Mapping
3.99E-06
2.00E-03
2.16E-03
Appendix
Table 4: Performance comparison of different mapping methods across multiple benchmark problems.
Model
Parameters
GC-PINN(Torus Mapping)
19,841
GC-PINN(Radial Mapping)
19,682
GC-PINN(Local Stretching)
19,684
PINN
19,681
FF-PINN
20,641
PINN+RAR
19,681
Appendix
Table 5: Parameter counts of compared PINNs.
Figure 9: Predicted solutions and error distributions across models for the 1D convection-diffusion equation (1).
Figure 10: Predicted solutions and error distributions across models for the 1D convection-diffusion equation (2).
Figure 11: Predicted solutions and error distributions across models for the 2D convection-diffusion equation (1).
Figure 12: Predicted solutions and error distributions across models for the 2D convection-diffusion equation (2).
Figure 13: Predicted solutions and error distributions across models for the 2D convection-diffusion equation (3).
Figure 14: Ground-truth solution for the 1/2D convection-diffusion equation.
Neural PDE solvers use trainable models to approximate solutions or solution operators for partial differential equations, often with physical constraints.
For systems with steep gradients, sharp interfaces, or severe spatio-temporal coupling, Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) suffer from spectral bias, geometric inflexibility, and boundary constraint conflicts, which undermine accuracy and convergence. To overcome these issues, we propose a geometry-adaptive and constraint-enhanced PINN (GAC-PINN). The framework comprises four components: a gradient-driven adaptive grid mapping (AGM) for diffeomorphic point concentration with Jacobian regularization, an adaptive bandwidth hard-constraint ansatz with spatially-varying boundary transition widths, a Gaussian Fourier feature mapping as a spectral preconditioner to further enhance high-wavenumber representation, and an operator-aware router that automatically selects the appropriate hard-constraint construction based on whether the governing PDE contains temporal derivatives. An AGM callback mechanism and a three-stage training strategy ensure stable coordination. Benchmarks including the viscous Burgers equation, a sharp-peaked 2D Poisson problem, and the Allen-Cahn phase-transition equation show that GAC-PINN attains relative (L^2) errors of ((1.747\pm 0.450)\times 10^{-4}), ((2.868\pm 0.947)\times 10^{-5}), and ((1.756 \pm 0.712)\times 10^{-3}), respectively, consistently outperforming the baselines. Ablation studies further reveal that AGM alone yields a substantially lower error than residual-based adaptive refinement (RAR), while RAR becomes beneficial only when combined with FFM, demonstrating a context-dependent module interaction. Convergence analysis verifies rapid error reduction and saturation with increasing resolution, establishing a practical adaptive framework for high-fidelity simulation of problems with localized sharp features in applied mechanics and computational physics.
Yanxin Zhang, Yong Zhang, Houbiao Li
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 611731, Sichuan, China
Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) often suffer from slow convergence, training instability, and reduced accuracy on challenging partial differential equations due to the anisotropic and rapidly varying geometry of their loss landscapes. We propose a lightweight curvature-aware optimization framework that augments existing first-order optimizers with an adaptive predictive correction based on secant information. Consecutive gradient differences are used as a cheap proxy for local geometric change, together with a step-normalized secant curvature indicator to control the correction strength. The framework is plug-and-play, computationally efficient, and broadly compatible with existing optimizers, without explicitly forming second-order matrices. Experiments on diverse PDE benchmarks show consistent improvements in convergence speed, training stability, and solution accuracy over standard optimizers and strong baselines, including on the high-dimensional heat equation, Gray--Scott system, Belousov--Zhabotinsky system, and 2D Kuramoto--Sivashinsky system.
Kang An, Chenhao Si, Shiqian Ma +1
School of Data Science The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen Shenzhen, China
We present pseudo-differential enhanced physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), an extension of gradient enhancement but in Fourier space. Gradient enhancement of PINNs dictates that the PDE residual is taken to a higher differential order than prescribed by the PDE, added to the objective as an augmented term in order to improve training and overall learning fidelity. We propose the same procedure after application via Fourier transforms, since differentiating in Fourier space is multiplication with the Fourier wavenumber under suitable decay. Our methods are fast and efficient. Our methods oftentimes achieve superior PINN versus numerical error in fewer training iterations, potentially pair well with few/fixed samples in collocation, and can achieve breakthrough rather than gradual effects on the error. Moreover, our methods are suitable for fractional derivatives. We establish that our methods, due to the dynamical effects, improve spectral eigenvalue decay of the neural tangent kernel (NTK), and so our methods contribute towards the learning of high frequencies in early training, mitigating the effects of frequency bias up to the polynomial order and possibly greater with smooth activations. In particular, our primary contribution can be characterized as gradient enhancement affects spectral bias, and we specialize to Fourier space, although our theory does not prove the ambient case exactly due to a result with the Plancherel theorem on the descent paths. Our methods accommodate advanced techniques in PINNs, such as Fourier feature embeddings. A pitfall of discrete Fourier transforms via the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is mesh subjugation, and so we demonstrate compatibility of our methods for greater mesh flexibility and invariance on alternative Euclidean and non-Euclidean domains via Monte Carlo methods and otherwise, although possessing trade-offs of their own.
Andrew Gracyk
Department of Mathematics, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, United States