Zihao Shi

h-index1
2papers

2 Papers

17.2NAMar 21
Preserving Conservation Laws in the Time-Evolving Natural Gradient Method via Relaxation and Projection Techniques

Zihao Shi, Dongling Wang

Neural networks have demonstrated significant potential in solving partial differential equations (PDEs). While global approaches such as Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) offer promising capabilities, they often lack inherent temporal causality, which can limit their accuracy and stability for time-dependent problems. In contrast, local training frameworks that progressively update network parameters over time are naturally suited for evolving PDEs. However, a critical challenge remains: many physical systems possess intrinsic invariants -- such as energy or mass -- that must be preserved to ensure physically meaningful solutions. This paper addresses this challenge by enhancing the Time-Evolving Natural Gradient (TENG) method, a recently proposed local training framework. We introduce two complementary techniques: (i) a relaxation algorithm that ensures the target solution $u_{\text{target}}$ preserves both quadratic and general nonlinear invariants of the original system, providing a structure-preserving learning target; and (ii) a projection technique that maps the updated network parameters $θ(t)$ back onto the invariant manifold, ensuring the final neural network solution strictly adheres to the conservation laws. Numerical experiments on the inviscid Burgers equation, Korteweg-de Vries equation, and acoustic wave equation demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly improves conservation properties while maintaining high accuracy.

LGDec 7, 2025
Measuring Over-smoothing beyond Dirichlet energy

Weiqi Guan, Zihao Shi

While Dirichlet energy serves as a prevalent metric for quantifying over-smoothing, it is inherently restricted to capturing first-order feature derivatives. To address this limitation, we propose a generalized family of node similarity measures based on the energy of higher-order feature derivatives. Through a rigorous theoretical analysis of the relationships among these measures, we establish the decay rates of Dirichlet energy under both continuous heat diffusion and discrete aggregation operators. Furthermore, our analysis reveals an intrinsic connection between the over-smoothing decay rate and the spectral gap of the graph Laplacian. Finally, empirical results demonstrate that attention-based Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) suffer from over-smoothing when evaluated under these proposed metrics.