Implicit neural representations (INRs) provide a flexible framework for modeling high-dimensional continuous fields, but their training is often inefficient due to uniform subsampling that ignores spatial heterogeneity. Existing adaptive sampling methods partially address this issue by prioritizing high-error samples, but typically operate at the point level, often leading to redundant sampling in localized regions and insufficient coverage of the domain. We propose ACES (Adaptive Coverage-aware Efficient Sampling), a structured sampling framework that improves training efficiency by decoupling coverage and importance. ACES constructs adaptive spatial partitions to ensure domain coverage and reduce redundancy, and applies region-level importance weighting to prioritize informative regions during training. We provide a theoretical analysis showing that adaptive partitioning reduces gradient variance by increasing within-region homogeneity, and that controlled bias in region-level weighting may improve optimization efficiency relative to standard unbiased estimators. Experiments on scientific field learning tasks demonstrate that ACES achieves faster convergence and lower error than uniform and pointwise adaptive sampling baselines, with the largest gains in fields with highly localized complexity.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Qualitative comparison of sampling strategies on a Navier–Stokes vorticity field at a training iteration. Uniform sampling provides broad coverage but allocates many samples to low-error regions, while pointwise importance sampling over-concentrates in localized high-error areas. ACES performs adaptive region-level sampling, balancing domain coverage and focused refinement. Point size indicates the region-level sampling weight.
Figure 2: Overview of ACES. (a) The loss field is highly heterogeneous, with localized high-error regions. (b) ACES builds an adaptive partition that allocates finer resolution to complex regions and coarser resolution elsewhere. (c) Region-based sampling ensures structured coverage of the domain while avoiding redundant samples. (d) Bias-controlled weighting emphasizes informative regions by assigning larger weights to high-error areas, leading to more effective optimization.
Figure 3: Training efficiency comparison. Left: one representative snapshot per dataset. Middle: full-grid evaluation relative MSE versus iteration. Right: full-grid evaluation relative MSE versus runtime. ACES achieves substantially faster convergence per iteration than Uniform, INT, and EVOS on both datasets. Under equal runtime budgets, ACES remains competitive on NS2D and achieves the largest gains on PoolBoiling2D, where informative regions are highly localized.
Method
200 epochs
1,200 epochs
2,400 epochs
5,000 epochs
PoolBoiling3D
INT
0.8378±0.1320
0.2600±0.0026
—
—
Uniform
0.2948±0.0012
0.1396±0.0014
0.1133±0.0004
0.0914±0.0016
Fixed Stratified
0.2760±0.0042
0.1359±0.0085
0.1231±0.0099
0.0914±0.0043
ACES (partition)
0.2484±0.0073
0.1181±0.0010
0.0941±0.0011
0.0718±0.0007
NS3D
Table 1: Joint spatiotemporal reconstruction on PoolBoiling3D and NS3D. All methods are evaluated at matched training checkpoints over 64 consecutive frames. Relative MSE (lower is better) is reported as mean ± standard deviation over three random seeds. Within each dataset, bold denotes the lowest mean error at each checkpoint. INT results are reported through 1,200 epochs.
Figure 5
Appendix figures & tables7 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 6: Empirical verification of the sufficient condition in Proposition 1 on PoolBoiling2D and NS2D using a budget-matched ACES partition ( α=0 , i.e. w=1 ). The curves show the mean with the min–max range over five time-frame runs per dataset. (a) The ascent slope dF/dα∣α=0=(∥g∥2+V)22∥g∥2∑ktklog∣rˉk∣ stays strictly positive at every training checkpoint on both datasets ( 60/60 configurations). (b) The underlying Spearman rank correlation ρ(tk,log∣rˉk∣) also stays positive throughout training, confirming that regions with larger residual magnitude tend to have a more favorable alignment-to-variance ratio tk , not only near initialization.
Figure 7: Original one-step improvement score across training steps, corresponding to Sw2/Gw before normalization/sign transformation.
Figure 8: Validation of residual variance as a proxy for gradient variance on NS2D. Left: Spearman rank correlation between σg,k2 and σr,k2 across checkpoints for random 16×16 and 32×32 region sets. Right: top- K overlap between regions selected by σg,k2 and σr,k2 . Both curves stay well above the random baseline, showing that residual variance preserves region ranking and high-importance region retrieval.
Method
200
400
800
2,000
5,000
Uniform random
0.9537±0.0047
0.9435±0.0141
0.8656±0.0730
0.5759±0.1898
0.2866±0.0411
INT
1.1370±0.0818
0.9045±0.0573
0.7092±0.0425
0.5009±0.0324
0.3359±0.0231
EVOS
2.6540±0.2279
1.1808±0.0780
0.7930±0.0544
0.4755±0.0292
0.3363±0.0189
Fixed stratified
0.9564±0.0014
0.9483±0.0093
0.9050±0.0366
0.6387±0.1542
0.3262±0.0590
ACES
1.4906±0.1301
1.1236±0.4569
0.6154±0.3184
0.2453±0.0469
0.1536±0.0263
Appendix
Table 2: Relative MSE on PoolBoiling2D using a Fourier Feature Network backbone (mean ± standard deviation over three seeds). Lower is better; bold denotes the lowest mean at each checkpoint.
Method
Training
Sampling
Partition
Total
Per update
Uniform
1.2474±0.0002
0.4140±0.0008
—
1.6615±0.0010
—
ACES
1.4688±0.0051
1.3547±0.0051
0.1609±0.0007
2.9844±0.0037
32.184±0.144
Appendix
Table 3: Runtime breakdown on NS2D in milliseconds per training iteration (mean ± standard deviation over three seeds). Partition construction is excluded from the sampling column and reported separately as an amortized cost. The final column gives the cost of one partition update.
α
0.1
0.2
0.5
1.0
2.0
3.0
4.0
5.0
PoolBoiling2D
0.1425
0.1363
0.1258
0.1097
0.1084
0.1096
0.1123
0.1117
NS2D
0.2816
0.2744
0.2605
0.2367
0.2196
0.2163
0.2156
0.2163
Appendix
Table 4: Sensitivity to the weighting exponent α . Lower relative MSE is better; bold denotes the lowest value in each row.
Update interval
PoolBoiling2D
NS2D
50
0.1228±0.0041
0.2368±0.0015
100
0.1242±0.0046
0.2374±0.0025
200
0.1235±0.0071
0.2373±0.0019
500
0.1235±0.0039
0.2380±0.0021
1,000
0.1243±0.0037
0.2387±0.0019
Initial only
0.1396±0.0077
0.2457±0.0021
Appendix
Table 5: Sensitivity to the partition-update interval. Relative MSE is reported as mean ± standard deviation; lower is better. “Initial only” constructs the partition at initialization and does not refresh it during the 5,000-iteration run.
Implicit neural representations (INRs) offer a powerful framework for modeling high-dimensional physical fields, but their training remains inefficient because evaluating dense coordinate grids is computationally expensive. Existing coordinate-pruning strategies rely on local error functions that can oversample correlated points and incur substantial overhead from full-grid error evaluation. We introduce Refined Grid Sampling (RGS), which combines stratified grid sampling, error-based refinement, and dynamic grid-resolution adjustment. This design reduces spatial redundancy without evaluating errors over the full grid. On high-resolution Navier--Stokes fields, RGS achieves higher reconstruction accuracy within a fixed wall-clock budget and reaches the accuracy of full-grid training up to 6× faster than the evaluated baselines.
Guang Zhao, Xihaier Luo, Sean McCue +5
Brookhaven National Laboratory Upton, NY 11973, USA · University of California San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093, USA · Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have emerged as promising surrogates for large 3D scientific simulations due to their ability to continuously model spatial and conditional fields, yet they face a critical fidelity-speed dilemma: deep MLPs suffer from high inference cost, while efficient embedding-based models lack sufficient expressiveness. To resolve this, we propose the Decoupled Representation Refinement (DRR) architectural paradigm. DRR leverages a deep refiner network, alongside non-parametric transformations, in a one-time offline process to encode rich representations into a compact and efficient embedding structure. This approach decouples slow neural networks with high representational capacity from the fast inference path. We introduce DRR-Net, a simple network that validates this paradigm, and a novel data augmentation strategy, Variational Pairs (VP) for improving INRs under complex tasks like high-dimensional surrogate modeling. Experiments on several ensemble simulation datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art fidelity, while being up to 27× faster at inference than high-fidelity baselines and remaining competitive with the fastest models. The DRR paradigm offers an effective strategy for building powerful and practical neural field surrogates and INRs in broader applications, with a minimal compromise between speed and quality.
Tianyu Xiong, Skylar Wurster, Han-Wei Shen
Department of Computer Science and Engineering Ohio State University Columbus, OH 43210, USA · Adobe San Francisco, CA, USA
Training neural networks to satisfy universal constraints over continuous domains poses unique challenges. Common examples include Lyapunov Neural Networks (Lyapunov NNs) and Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), where analytical solutions are generally either unavailable or overly restrictive. Sample-based methods are therefore commonly used to enforce these constraints, and the choice of samples has a substantial impact on convergence speed, stability, and solution quality. Most existing methods rely on fixed heuristics or handcrafted rules, and are suboptimal in practice. In this paper, we aim to improve upon them by learning, from data and experience, how to dynamically and iteratively adjust the samples in response to the model's evolving learning performance. Trained by reinforcement learning, the learned policy improves empirical constraint satisfaction on test problems while significantly improving efficiency. We validate the approach on both Lyapunov NNs and PINNs, and demonstrate its broader applicability to domains where adaptive input selection is essential for effective training.