cs.LGJul 4, 2026

PIEFS: Physics-Informed Eigenfunction Features with Learnable Scaling

Authors: Varvara Nazarenko, Timur Lidzhiev, Alexander Tarakanov

Abstract

Spectral methods are widely used to construct representations from the geometry of data, but they often rely on a fixed kernel, graph Laplacian, or manually selected feature scaling. We propose Physics-Informed Eigenfunction Features with Learnable Scaling (PIEFS), a supervised neural representation-learning framework with a spectral inductive bias, based on a modified Dirichlet energy. In PIEFS, scalar coordinate maps are trained under empirical Gram orthogonality, a supervised linear readout, and a Dirichlet penalty in which the input gradient is transformed by a learnable metric A(x)=Λ(x)U(x)A(x)=Λ(x)U(x). The diagonal factor Λ(x)Λ(x) controls anisotropic scaling, while the orthogonal factor U(x)U(x) is parameterized by a structured product of Givens rotations. This construction yields task-adaptive Dirichlet-regularized coordinates rather than eigenfunctions of a fixed supervision-independent operator. Experiments on synthetic, tabular, and image-based benchmarks study the effect of identity, diagonal, and rotation-scaling metrics, and compare the resulting coordinates with classical baselines and NeuralEF. The results support PIEFS as a compact supervised spectral representation method and identify optimization stability, validation on explicit operator eigenproblems, and richer metric parameterizations as the main directions for future work.

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