DAS-PINNs for high-dimensional partial differential equations: extending deep adaptive sampling to spacetime domains

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) provide a promising machine learning framework for solving partial differential equations, but their training often breaks down on challenging problems, sometimes converging to physically incorrect solutions despite achieving small residual losses. This failure, we argue, is not merely an optimization difficulty. Rather, it reflects a fundamental weakness of the empirical PDE residual loss, which can admit trivial or spurious solutions during training. From this perspective, we revisit pseudo-time stepping, a technique that has recently shown strong empirical success in PINNs. We show that its main benefit is not simply to ease optimization; instead, when combined with collocation-point resampling, it helps reveal and avoid spurious solutions. At the same time, we find that the effectiveness of pseudo-time stepping depends critically on the choice of step size, which cannot be tuned reliably from the training loss alone. To overcome this limitation, we propose an adaptive pseudo-time stepping strategy that selects the step size from a finite-difference surrogate of the local residual Jacobian, yielding the largest step permitted by local stability without per-problem tuning. Across a diverse set of PDE benchmarks, the proposed method consistently improves both accuracy and robustness. Together, these findings provide a clearer understanding of why PINNs fail and suggest a practical pathway toward more reliable physics-informed learning. All code and data accompanying this manuscript are available at https://github.com/sifanexisted/jaxpi2.

Solving time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) is an important problem in computational science and engineering. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) learn PDE solutions from governing equations. However, accurately capturing temporal evolution remains challenging. Recent sequence-model-based approaches parameterize time evolution using general-purpose sequence models, which capture temporal dependencies but do not explicitly encode the structured dynamics of PDE solutions. In addition, their memory requirements can scale unfavorably with sequence length and resolution, limiting applicability in large-scale or high-dimensional settings. This work introduces a PINN approach that incorporates oscillatory state-space dynamics to represent the modal structure of PDE solutions. The proposed method leverages a linear-oscillator-based temporal evolution, together with a PDE-aware spectral basis in space. This design enables closed-form spatial differentiation and consistent enforcement of boundary conditions. The method is evaluated on forward, inverse, and high-dimensional PDE problems, including cases up to 100 spatial dimensions. The results show improved accuracy and reduced memory usage compared to recent sequence-model-based PINN approaches. Overall, this work highlights the benefits of incorporating structured dynamical priors into the temporal evolution of neural PDE solvers and suggests designing more physics-aligned and computationally efficient PINN architectures.

In recent years, physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have gained significant attention for solving differential equations, although they suffer from two fundamental limitations, namely, spectral bias inherent in neural networks and loss imbalance arising from multiscale phenomena. This paper proposes an adaptive wavelet-based PINN (AW-PINN) to address the extreme loss imbalance characteristic of problems with localized high-magnitude source terms. Such problems frequently arise in various physical applications, such as thermal processing, electro-magnetics, impact mechanics, and fluid dynamics involving localized forcing. The proposed framework dynamically adjusts the wavelet basis function based on residual and supervised loss. This adaptive nature makes AW-PINN handle problems with high-scale features effectively without being memory-intensive. Additionally, AW-PINN does not rely on automatic differentiation to obtain derivatives involved in the loss function, which accelerates the training process. The method operates in two stages, an initial short pre-training phase with fixed bases to select physically relevant wavelet families, followed by an adaptive refinement that adapts scales and translations without populating high-resolution bases across entire domains. Theoretically, we show that under certain assumptions, AW-PINN admits a Gaussian process limit and derive its associated NTK structure. We evaluate AW-PINN on several challenging PDEs featuring localized high-magnitude source terms with extreme loss imbalances having ratios up to $10^{10}:1$. Across these PDEs, including transient heat conduction, highly localized Poisson problems, oscillatory flow equations, and Maxwell equations with a point charge source, AW-PINN consistently outperforms existing methods in its class.