NAOct 16, 2022
A cusp-capturing PINN for elliptic interface problemsYu-Hau Tseng, Te-Sheng Lin, Wei-Fan Hu et al.
In this paper, we propose a cusp-capturing physics-informed neural network (PINN) to solve discontinuous-coefficient elliptic interface problems whose solution is continuous but has discontinuous first derivatives on the interface. To find such a solution using neural network representation, we introduce a cusp-enforced level set function as an additional feature input to the network to retain the inherent solution properties; that is, capturing the solution cusps (where the derivatives are discontinuous) sharply. In addition, the proposed neural network has the advantage of being mesh-free, so it can easily handle problems in irregular domains. We train the network using the physics-informed framework in which the loss function comprises the residual of the differential equation together with certain interface and boundary conditions. We conduct a series of numerical experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the cusp-capturing technique and the accuracy of the present network model. Numerical results show that even using a one-hidden-layer (shallow) network with a moderate number of neurons and sufficient training data points, the present network model can achieve prediction accuracy comparable with traditional methods. Besides, if the solution is discontinuous across the interface, we can simply incorporate an additional supervised learning task for solution jump approximation into the present network without much difficulty.
NAOct 11, 2022
An efficient neural-network and finite-difference hybrid method for elliptic interface problems with applicationsWei-Fan Hu, Te-Sheng Lin, Yu-Hau Tseng et al.
A new and efficient neural-network and finite-difference hybrid method is developed for solving Poisson equation in a regular domain with jump discontinuities on embedded irregular interfaces. Since the solution has low regularity across the interface, when applying finite difference discretization to this problem, an additional treatment accounting for the jump discontinuities must be employed. Here, we aim to elevate such an extra effort to ease our implementation by machine learning methodology. The key idea is to decompose the solution into singular and regular parts. The neural network learning machinery incorporating the given jump conditions finds the singular solution, while the standard five-point Laplacian discretization is used to obtain the regular solution with associated boundary conditions. Regardless of the interface geometry, these two tasks only require supervised learning for function approximation and a fast direct solver for Poisson equation, making the hybrid method easy to implement and efficient. The two- and three-dimensional numerical results show that the present hybrid method preserves second-order accuracy for the solution and its derivatives, and it is comparable with the traditional immersed interface method in the literature. As an application, we solve the Stokes equations with singular forces to demonstrate the robustness of the present method.
NAMar 19, 2025
A categorical embedding discontinuity-capturing shallow neural network for anisotropic elliptic interface problemsWei-Fan Hu, Te-Sheng Lin, Yu-Hau Tseng et al.
In this paper, we propose a categorical embedding discontinuity-capturing shallow neural network for anisotropic elliptic interface problems. The architecture comprises three hidden layers: a discontinuity-capturing layer, which maps domain segments to disconnected sets in a higher-dimensional space; a categorical embedding layer, which reduces the high-dimensional information into low-dimensional features; and a fully connected layer, which models the continuous mapping. This design enables a single neural network to approximate piecewise smooth functions with high accuracy, even when the number of discontinuous pieces ranges from tens to hundreds. By automatically learning discontinuity embeddings, the proposed categorical embedding technique avoids the need for explicit domain labeling, providing a scalable, efficient, and mesh-free framework for approximating piecewise continuous solutions. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we apply the proposed method to solve anisotropic elliptic interface problems, training by minimizing the mean squared error loss of the governing system. Numerical experiments demonstrate that, despite its shallow and simple structure, the proposed method achieves accuracy and efficiency comparable to traditional grid-based numerical methods.