Structure-Preserving Physics-Informed Neural Network for the Korteweg--de Vries (KdV) Equation
This addresses the issue of physical inconsistency in PINNs for nonlinear PDEs like KdV, which is important for computational physics and engineering applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing PINN frameworks.
The paper tackled the problem of conventional Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) failing to preserve physical invariants like mass and energy for the KdV equation, resulting in a structure-preserving PINN that successfully reproduced soliton behaviors and maintained conserved invariants in case studies.
Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) offer a flexible framework for solving nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs), yet conventional implementations often fail to preserve key physical invariants during long-term integration. This paper introduces a \emph{structure-preserving PINN} framework for the nonlinear Korteweg--de Vries (KdV) equation, a prototypical model for nonlinear and dispersive wave propagation. The proposed method embeds the conservation of mass and Hamiltonian energy directly into the loss function, ensuring physically consistent and energy-stable evolution throughout training and prediction. Unlike standard \texttt{tanh}-based PINNs~\cite{raissi2019pinn,wang2022modifiedpinn}, our approach employs sinusoidal activation functions that enhance spectral expressiveness and accurately capture the oscillatory and dispersive nature of KdV solitons. Through representative case studies -- including single-soliton propagation (shape-preserving translation), two-soliton interaction (elastic collision with phase shift), and cosine-pulse initialization (nonlinear dispersive breakup) -- the model successfully reproduces hallmark behaviors of KdV dynamics while maintaining conserved invariants. Ablation studies demonstrate that combining invariant-constrained optimization with sinusoidal feature mappings accelerates convergence, improves long-term stability, and mitigates drift without multi-stage pretraining. These results highlight that computationally efficient, invariant-aware regularization coupled with sinusoidal representations yields robust, energy-consistent PINNs for Hamiltonian partial differential equations such as the KdV equation.