Pre-training strategy for solving evolution equations based on physics-informed neural networks

Abstract: The physics informed neural network (PINN) is a promising method for solving time-evolution partial differential equations (PDEs). However, the standard PINN method may fail to solve the PDEs with strongly nonlinear characteristics or those with high-frequency solutions. The physics informed neural network (PINN) is a promising method for solving time-evolution partial differential equations (PDEs). However, the standard PINN method may fail to solve the PDEs with strongly nonlinear characteristics or those with high-frequency solutions. The PT-PINN method transforms the difficult problem on the entire time domain to relatively simple problems defined on small subdomains. The neural network trained on small subdomains provides the neural network initialization and extra supervised learning data for the problems on larger subdomains or on the entire time-domain. By numerical experiments, we demonstrate that the PT-PINN succeeds in solving the evolution PDEs with strong non-linearity and/or high frequency solutions, including the strongly nonlinear heat equation, the Allen-Cahn equation, the convection equation with high-frequency solutions and so on, and that the convergence and accuracy of the PT-PINN is superior to the standard PINN method. The PT-PINN method is a competitive method for solving the time-evolution PDEs.