Active Learning for Neural PDE Solvers
This addresses the data efficiency problem for researchers and engineers using neural PDE solvers, though it is incremental as it applies existing active learning methods to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of high data costs for neural PDE solvers by introducing an active learning benchmark, showing that active learning reduces average error by up to 71% compared to random sampling and improves worst-case errors.
Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) is a fundamental problem in science and engineering. While neural PDE solvers can be more efficient than established numerical solvers, they often require large amounts of training data that is costly to obtain. Active learning (AL) could help surrogate models reach the same accuracy with smaller training sets by querying classical solvers with more informative initial conditions and PDE parameters. While AL is more common in other domains, it has yet to be studied extensively for neural PDE solvers. To bridge this gap, we introduce AL4PDE, a modular and extensible active learning benchmark. It provides multiple parametric PDEs and state-of-the-art surrogate models for the solver-in-the-loop setting, enabling the evaluation of existing and the development of new AL methods for neural PDE solving. We use the benchmark to evaluate batch active learning algorithms such as uncertainty- and feature-based methods. We show that AL reduces the average error by up to 71% compared to random sampling and significantly reduces worst-case errors. Moreover, AL generates similar datasets across repeated runs, with consistent distributions over the PDE parameters and initial conditions. The acquired datasets are reusable, providing benefits for surrogate models not involved in the data generation.