{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/accelerated-training-of-physics-informed","title":"Accelerated Training of Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) using Meshless Discretizations","arxiv_id":"2205.09332","date":"2022-05-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ramansh Sharma","Varun Shankar"],"abstract":"We present a new technique for the accelerated training of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs): discretely-trained PINNs (DT-PINNs). The repeated computation of partial derivative terms in the PINN loss functions via automatic differentiation during training is known to be computationally expensive, especially for higher-order derivatives. DT-PINNs are trained by replacing these exact spatial derivatives with high-order accurate numerical discretizations computed using meshless radial basis function-finite differences (RBF-FD) and applied via sparse-matrix vector multiplication. The use of RBF-FD allows for DT-PINNs to be trained even on point cloud samples placed on irregular domain geometries. Additionally, though traditional PINNs (vanilla-PINNs) are typically stored and trained in 32-bit floating-point (fp32) on the GPU, we show that for DT-PINNs, using fp64 on the GPU leads to significantly faster training times than fp32 vanilla-PINNs with comparable accuracy. We demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of DT-PINNs via a series of experiments. First, we explore the effect of network depth on both numerical and automatic differentiation of a neural network with random weights and show that RBF-FD approximations of third-order accuracy and above are more efficient while being sufficiently accurate. We then compare the DT-PINNs to vanilla-PINNs on both linear and nonlinear Poisson equations and show that DT-PINNs achieve similar losses with 2-4x faster training times on a consumer GPU. Finally, we also demonstrate that similar results can be obtained for the PINN solution to the heat equation (a space-time problem) by discretizing the spatial derivatives using RBF-FD and using automatic differentiation for the temporal derivative. Our results show that fp64 DT-PINNs offer a superior cost-accuracy profile to fp32 vanilla-PINNs.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.09332v6","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.09332v6.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"accelerated-training-of-physics-informed","repo_url":"https://github.com/rsmath/dt-pinn","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"GPU"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2205.09332","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}