WGFINNs: Weak formulation-based GENERIC formalism informed neural networks

We introduce Nonlinear GENERIC Informed Neural Networks (N-GINNs), a deep learning framework for discovering evolution equations of systems governed by the nonlinear GENERIC formalism (General Equation for Non-Equilibrium Reversible-Irreversible Coupling). Such systems exhibit coupled conservative and dissipative dynamics, and can be described via the superposition of a Hamiltonian flow and a generalized gradient flow. In contrast to existing approaches, our formulation incorporates generalized gradient flows via convex dissipation potentials, enabling the identification of a broader class of thermodynamically consistent dynamics, including systems with non-quadratic dissipation potentials. Thermodynamic structure is strongly enforced by construction through suitable reparameterizations of both the bivector operator and the dissipation potential, ensuring exact compliance with the first and second laws of thermodynamics. We validate the proposed approach on three representative examples: a harmonic oscillator coupled to a heat bath, an idealized chemical motor, and a one-dimensional viscoplastic model of Perzyna type. These results demonstrate the method's ability to accurately infer thermodynamically consistent models from data for systems incorporating both conservative and nonlinear dissipative dynamics.

The accurate forecasting of complex, high-dimensional dynamical systems from observational data is a fundamental task across numerous scientific and engineering disciplines. A significant challenge arises from noise-corrupted measurements, which severely degrade the performance of data-driven models. In chaotic dynamical systems, where small initial errors amplify exponentially, it is particularly difficult to develop a model from noisy data that achieves short-term accuracy while preserving long-term invariant properties. To overcome this, we consider the weak formulation as a complementary approach to the classical $L2$-loss function for training models of dynamical systems. We empirically verify that the weak formulation, with a proper choice of test function and integration domain, effectively filters noisy data. This insight explains why a weak form loss function is analogous to fitting a model to filtered data and provides a practical way to parameterize the weak form. Subsequently, we demonstrate how this approach overcomes the instability and inaccuracy of standard Neural ODE (NODE) in modeling chaotic systems. Through numerical examples, we show that our proposed training strategy, the Weak Penalty NODE, is computationally efficient, solver-agnostic, and yields accurate and robust forecasts across benchmark chaotic systems and a real-world climate dataset.

Discovering governing Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) from sparse and noisy data is a challenging issue in data-driven scientific computing. Conventional sparse regression methods often suffer from two major limitations: (i) the instability of numerical differentiation under sparse and noisy data, and (ii) the restricted flexibility of a pre-defined candidate library. We propose Weak-PDE-Net, an end-to-end differentiable framework that can robustly identify open-form PDEs. Weak-PDE-Net consists of two interconnected modules: a forward response learner and a weak-form PDE generator. The learner embeds learnable Gaussian kernels within a lightweight MLP, serving as a surrogate model that adaptively captures system dynamics from sparse observations. Meanwhile, the generator integrates a symbolic network with an integral module to construct weak-form PDEs, avoiding explicit numerical differentiation and improving robustness to noise. To relax the constraints of the pre-defined library, we leverage Differentiable Neural Architecture Search strategy during training to explore the functional space, which enables the efficient discovery of open-form PDEs. The capability of Weak-PDE-Net in multivariable systems discovery is further enhanced by incorporating Galilean Invariance constraints and symmetry equivariance hypotheses to ensure physical consistency. Experiments on several challenging PDE benchmarks demonstrate that Weak-PDE-Net accurately recovers governing equations, even under highly sparse and noisy observations.