Silent Failures in Physics-Informed Neural Networks: Parameter Poisoning and the Limits of Loss-Based Validation

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 $23\times$ fewer collocation points and a vanilla architecture.

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.

Neural operators evaluate parametric partial differential equations cheaply but degrade sharply outside their training distribution. Physics-informed neural networks avoid dependence on labeled data, yet their optimization can be basin-fragile: when the governing residual admits multiple solutions, a PINN trained from scratch may converge to a physically incorrect state despite achieving a small residual. We show that these failure modes can be addressed jointly: an imperfect NO provides the structural prior needed to place a PINN in the correct solution basin, while the PDE residual refines the solution beyond the operator's accuracy. We introduce a three-stage framework that freezes the spatial basis of a physics-informed NO, extrapolates its solution branch to an out-of-distribution parameter using a polynomial continuation prior, and distills the resulting field into a fresh PINN. The NO need not be accurate at the target; it transfers solution-branch information, while PDE residual minimization in the PINN governs convergence. We evaluate the framework on three nonlinear PDEs: 1D viscous Burgers, 2D steady Allen-Cahn near a pitchfork bifurcation, and 2D steady lid-driven cavity flow. For Allen-Cahn, where the trivial solution satisfies the PDE residual exactly, a standard PINN collapses to the trivial zero branch, whereas distillation from the crude extrapolated operator recovers the non-trivial branch that matches the finite-difference reference. For the lid-driven cavity, extrapolating to a Reynolds number of Re = 3200 accelerates convergence to the correct physical state, achieving competitive accuracy using fewer parameters and optimization steps than recent literature baselines. These results establish a simple principle: an NO need not accurately predict the solution to be useful; it only needs to identify the correct basin from which PINN optimization can recover it.