Noisy PDE Training Requires Bigger PINNs

Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) are increasingly used to approximate solutions of partial differential equations (PDEs), especially in high dimensions. In real-world applications, data samples are noisy, so it is important to know when a predictor can still achieve low empirical risk. However, little is known about the conditions under which a PINN can do so effectively. We prove a lower bound on the size of neural networks required for the supervised PINN empirical risk to fall below the variance of noisy supervision labels. Specifically, if a predictor achieves an empirical risk $O(\eta)$ below $\sigma^2$ (variance of supervision data), then necessarily $d_N\log d_N\gtrsim N_s \eta^2$, where $N_s$ is the number of samples and $d_N$ is the number of trainable parameters of the PINN. A similar constraint applies to the fully unsupervised PINN setting when boundary labels are sampled noisily. Consequently, increasing the number of noisy supervision labels alone does not provide a ``free lunch'' in reducing empirical risk. We also show empirically that PINNs can indeed achieve empirical risks below $\sigma^2$ under such conditions. As a case study, we investigate PINNs applied to the Hamilton--Jacobi--Bellman (HJB) PDE. Our findings lay the groundwork for quantitatively understanding the parameter requirements for training PINNs in the presence of noise.