A Dirac-Frenkel-Onsager principle: Instantaneous residual minimization with gauge momentum for nonlinear parametrizations of PDE solutions

Even when Dirac-Frenkel dynamics determine a well-defined evolution in function space, the corresponding parameter dynamics can be non-unique or ill-conditioned for redundant nonlinear parametrizations such as neural networks or mixture models. We propose to add inertia to the Dirac-Frenkel dynamics and show that this allows useful parameter velocity information to persist from the past trajectory in directions that are weakly informed, while well-informed parameter velocity directions continue to follow the Dirac-Frenkel dynamics. We prove that the inertial formulation yields well-posed parameter dynamics and provide a posteriori error bounds. After time discretization, the method requires the solution of the same type of regularized linear least-squares problem as standard Dirac-Frenkel dynamics, but with the previous velocity appearing as an anchor. Numerical experiments demonstrate the increased robustness obtained with inertia.

Energy natural gradient descent (ENGD) aligns parameter updates with the curvature of an underlying function-space energy, but existing formulations assume an unconstrained Euclidean parameter domain. We introduce \EMNGDfull{}, a manifold optimization framework for physics-informed and variational neural PDE solvers whose parameters lie on a Riemannian manifold. EMNGD restricts the energy-induced quadratic model to feasible tangent directions and uses retractions to preserve parameter constraints throughout optimization. Under coercivity, we prove that the push-forward of the undamped EMNGD direction is the best feasible approximation to the function-space Newton vector in the energy metric. We establish coordinate invariance, exact reduction to ENGD in Euclidean space, global first-order convergence with Armijo backtracking, and robustness to inexact tangent solves. For quadratic residual energies and generalized Gauss--Newton pullbacks, the Woodbury identity transfers the tangent system to sample space without changing the direction. Nyström approximation provides scalable sample-space solves with controlled direction error and recovers the exact direction after iterative convergence. On the evaluated neural PDE benchmarks, EMNGD achieves higher accuracy and faster convergence than the compared state-of-the-art baselines. Woodbury preserves the EMNGD direction, while scalable-solver diagnostics quantify the accuracy--cost trade-off of preconditioning and residual subsampling.

It is well known that Newton's method converges faster when the initial guess is closer to a root of a system of nonlinear equations. In this paper, a two-stage Newton initial guess strategy is proposed by learning features from a parameter-space sampling and a database of precomputed solutions. The method uses discrete Newton trajectories to construct two complementary reduced spaces: a solution feature space, built from converged states, and a corrective search direction feature space, built from intermediate Newton increments. For an unseen parameter, a regression model is used to predict a surrogate solution approximation. Then, in a second step, a residual-minimizing correction is computed using a dedicated GMRES-based approach. The resulting state is then used as an initial guess for the high-fidelity Newton method, which completes convergence. The corrective step is computationally inexpensive since it only requires residual evaluations and the solution of a small least-squares problem. The methodology is weakly intrusive once the high-fidelity residual fields and a script-based programming interface are available. This strategy reduces the number of Newton iterations and decreases the overall CPU time. Numerical experiments on representative PDE problems show quantifiable speedups compared with standalone surrogate initialization. Significant speedups are observed. This generic approach can be applied to a broad class of large-scale nonlinear problems.