KAN-ODEs: Kolmogorov-Arnold Network Ordinary Differential Equations for Learning Dynamical Systems and Hidden Physics

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) as an alternative to Multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) are a recent development demonstrating strong potential for data-driven modeling. This work applies KANs as the backbone of a Neural Ordinary Differential Equation framework, generalizing their use to the time-dependent and grid-sensitive cases often seen in scientific machine learning applications. The proposed KAN-ODEs retain the flexible dynamical system modeling framework of Neural ODEs while leveraging the many benefits of KANs, including faster neural scaling, stronger interpretability, and lower parameter counts when compared against MLPs. We demonstrate these benefits in three test cases: the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model, Burgers' equation, and the Fisher-KPP PDE. We showcase the strong performance of parameter-lean KAN-ODE systems generally in reconstructing entire dynamical systems, and also in targeted applications to the inference of a source term in an otherwise known flow field. We additionally demonstrate the interpretability of KAN-ODEs via activation function visualization and symbolic regression of trained results. The successful training of KAN-ODEs and their improved performance when compared to traditional Neural ODEs implies significant potential in leveraging this novel network architecture in myriad scientific machine learning applications.

Stiff Neural Ordinary Differential Equations

Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE) are a promising approach to learn dynamic models from time-series data in science and engineering applications. This work aims at learning Neural ODE for stiff systems, which are usually raised from chemical kinetic modeling in chemical and biological systems. We first show the challenges of learning neural ODE in the classical stiff ODE systems of Robertson's problem and propose techniques to mitigate the challenges associated with scale separations in stiff systems. We then present successful demonstrations in stiff systems of Robertson's problem and an air pollution problem. The demonstrations show that the usage of deep networks with rectified activations, proper scaling of the network outputs as well as loss functions, and stabilized gradient calculations are the key techniques enabling the learning of stiff neural ODE. The success of learning stiff neural ODE opens up possibilities of using neural ODEs in applications with widely varying time-scales, like chemical dynamics in energy conversion, environmental engineering, and the life sciences.