PhysicsSolver: Transformer-Enhanced Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Forward and Forecasting Problems in Partial Differential Equations

TL;DR

PhysicsSolver introduces a transformer-enhanced physics-informed neural network that effectively predicts the evolution of physical systems governed by PDEs, addressing limitations of traditional PINNs and data-driven methods in capturing temporal dependencies.

Contribution

The paper presents PhysicsSolver, a novel transformer-based framework that combines data-free and data-driven approaches to improve PDE solution predictions over time.

Findings

Demonstrates superior accuracy over traditional PINNs

Shows robustness in various PDE problems

Efficient in computational resource usage

Abstract

Time-dependent partial differential equations are a significant class of equations that describe the evolution of various physical phenomena over time. One of the open problems in scientific computing is predicting the behaviour of the solution outside the given temporal region. Most traditional numerical methods are applied to a given time-space region and can only accurately approximate the solution of the given region. To address this problem, many deep learning-based methods, basically data-driven and data-free approaches, have been developed to solve these problems. However, most data-driven methods require a large amount of data, which consumes significant computational resources and fails to utilize all the necessary information embedded underlying the partial differential equations (PDEs). Moreover, data-free approaches such as Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) may not be that ideal in practice, as traditional PINNs, which primarily rely on multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs), tend to overlook the crucial temporal dependencies inherent in real-world physical systems. We propose a method denoted as \textbf{PhysicsSolver} that merges the strengths of two approaches: data-free methods that can learn the intrinsic properties of physical systems without using data, and data-driven methods, which are effective at making predictions. Extensive numerical experiments have demonstrated the efficiency and robustness of our proposed method. We provide the code at \href{https://github.com/PhysicsSolver/PhysicsSolver}{https://github.com/PhysicsSolver}.