Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Parameterized PDEs: A Metalearning Approach

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) as a means of discretizing partial differential equations (PDEs) are garnering much attention in the Computational Science and Engineering (CS&E) world. At least two challenges exist for PINNs at present: an understanding of accuracy and convergence characteristics with respect to tunable parameters and identification of optimization strategies that make PINNs as efficient as other computational science tools. The cost of PINNs training remains a major challenge of Physics-informed Machine Learning (PiML) -- and, in fact, machine learning (ML) in general. This paper is meant to move towards addressing the latter through the study of PINNs for parameterized PDEs. Following the ML world, we introduce metalearning of PINNs for parameterized PDEs. By introducing metalearning and transfer learning concepts, we can greatly accelerate the PINNs optimization process. We present a survey of model-agnostic metalearning, and then discuss our model-aware metalearning applied to PINNs. We provide theoretically motivated and empirically backed assumptions that make our metalearning approach possible. We then test our approach on various canonical forward parameterized PDEs that have been presented in the emerging PINNs literature.