Abstract
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) embed governing equations in their loss function, enabling mesh-free solutions to partial differential equations. Low training loss is treated as evidence that the learned solution is physically correct. This paper shows that assumption breaks down when encoded physics are incorrect. By perturbing PDE parameters before training, a setting we describe as physics parameter poisoning or parameter misspecification, we produce models that train to low loss but give incorrect answers; we treat the perturbation schedule as sensitivity analysis rather than only as a security threat, and none of our claims requires an adversary. Achieving low residual loss does not discriminate accurate from inaccurate solutions: poisoned models reach losses at or below the clean baseline yet differ by large margins, so driving the residual down is not evidence of physical accuracy. Across three PDE systems (Burgers equation, Navier-Stokes cavity, and convection-diffusion), poisoned models match or beat the clean-model training loss while their solutions differ by up to 71% in the fixed sweep and up to 128% under adversarial search; at Cavity Re=400 the poisoned loss falls below the clean baseline. We define a detection difficulty ratio R (solution error divided by training loss) to summarize how invisible the corruption is, though cross-PDE comparison is complicated by differences in loss scale. We test six candidate defenses, none of which reliably detects corruption across all regimes. We propose a post-hoc defense: sweeping the PDE residual loss across parameter values without retraining. The loss minimum recovers the true training parameter without external data, and generalizes across all three PDE systems. The effect holds across five network architectures (8.7K to 133K parameters), is bidirectional, and is confirmed across multiple random seeds.
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May 29, 2026cs.LG
Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) are a common class of machine learning-based partial differential equation (PDE) solvers which train a network to represent a solution by minimizing a residual loss that encodes the PDE. Despite their successes, they are known to fail on certain simple equations, converging to an incorrect solution despite low loss. These failure modes have garnered significant attention in the literature over the past several years, motivating both architectural and optimization based solutions. By directly visualizing the residual, we show that failure modes are the result of overfitting: the loss is minimized on the collocation points, but not elsewhere. Applying regularization causes the failure modes to vanish. Finally, we extend double backpropagation over the full set of residuals, and use it to achieve state-of-the-art performance on four standard failure mode equations with up to
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Nigel T. Andersen, Takashi Matsubara
Jun 3, 2026cs.LG
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) approximate solutions of ODEs and PDEs by minimising a weighted combination of residual, boundary, initial, and data losses. Their performance is often dominated by the choice of loss weights: a poor weighting can drive training to a degenerate solution in which one physical constraint is satisfied while another is ignored. Existing methods select or adapt a single good set of weights. We take a different view: instead of tuning one weight vector, we explore the entire weight space during training. We introduce LC-PINN, which adapts the loss-conditional training of Dosovitskiy and Djolonga (2020) to the PDE-residual setting: the conditioning vector (either the loss weights or a scalar physical coefficient) is treated as a network input and sampled from a simple prior at every optimisation step. This turns PINN training into learning a continuous family of solutions indexed by that vector, with no solver-generated paired data. LC-PINN thus lies between classical PINNs and operator learning: it stays fully physics-informed but amortises training over a parametric family. Our contribution is not the loss-conditional construction itself, but its extension to PINNs, the unification of the loss-weight and parametric-coefficient regimes under one architecture (concatenation for loss weights, FiLM for coefficients), and a fixed-quadrature L-BFGS finishing protocol that makes the parametric-coefficient regime trainable. We give a lambda-invariance result for the conditional optimum and study LC-PINN on parametric Helmholtz, Schrodinger, viscous Burgers, and Buckley-Leverett equations. A single LC-PINN matches or improves retrained per-weight PINN baselines while parameterising the full family in one model, at a total cost that amortises favourably against per-instance retraining.
Anna Lazareva, Alexander Tarakanov
Jul 15, 2026cs.LG
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have had a broad research impact in modeling domains governed by partial differential equations (PDE). However, PINNs have been shown to perform poorly, sometimes even converging to trivial solutions, in challenging PDE domains, or when generalizing to unseen but related PDE domains. Previously proposed solutions detail hyperparameter tuning to reduce loss imbalance between data-driven and physics guided losses, curriculum learning based training strategies, or dynamic re-sampling of hard collocation points. These methods face certain pitfalls: hyperparameter tuning is expensive, designing a training curriculum is ambiguous in multi-parameter PDE settings, and dynamic resampling still fails in complex PDE settings. Complementary to this line of thinking, we believe the initial PINN network weights also play a crucial role in the emergence of catastrophic failures during training, yet the effect of PINN weight initialization has been surprisingly under-investigated. To this end, we propose a framework for Learned Initialization via Gated Layerwise Optimization (LIGO-PINN) to overcome PINN convergence failures. Through rigorous evaluation on 1D and 2D PDE domains, including a challenging 2D fluid dynamics setting, we demonstrate that our methodology outperforms state-of-the-art methods designed to alleviate PINN failures, achieving a 91.5% average performance improvement across six baselines and 81% over the strongest baseline. We also verify that LIGO-PINN generalizes to 3D unstructured domains. Finally, we analyze training dynamics across all three PDE domains to explain both LIGO-PINN's improvement and the convergence failure of traditional PINNs. Code: https://github.com/scailab/ligo-pinn Keywords: Machine Learning, Physics-Informed Neural Networks, Deep Learning, PDE Modeling
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