Causality-guided adaptive sampling method for physics-informed neural networks solving forward problems of partial differential equations

Compared to purely data-driven methods, a key feature of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) — a proven powerful tool for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) — is the embedding of PDE constraints into the loss function. The selection and distribution of collocation points for evaluating PDE residuals are critical to the performance of PINNs. Furthermore, the causal training is currently a popular training mode. In this work, we propose the causality-guided adaptive sampling (Causal AS) method for PINNs. Given the characteristics of causal training, we use the weighted PDE residuals as the indicator for the selection of collocation points to focus on areas with larger PDE residuals within the regions being trained. For the hyper-parameter p involved, we develop the temporal alignment driven update (TADU) scheme for its dynamic update beyond simply fixing it as a constant. The collocation points selected at each time will be released before the next adaptive sampling step to avoid the cumulative effects caused by previously chosen collocation points and reduce computational costs. To illustrate the effectiveness of the Causal AS method, we apply it to solve time-dependent equations, including the Allen-Cahn equation, the NLS equation, the KdV equation and the mKdV equation. During the training process, we employ a time-marching technique and strictly impose the periodic boundary conditions by embedding the input coordinates into Fourier expansion to mitigate optimization challenges. Numerical results indicate that the predicted solution achieves an excellent agreement with the ground truth. Compared to a similar work, the causal extension of R3 sampling (Causal R3), our proposed Causal AS method demonstrates a significant advantage in accuracy.