Meshless solutions of PDE inverse problems on irregular geometries

TL;DR

This paper introduces a meshless spectral method for solving inverse PDE problems on irregular domains, leveraging optimization and PINNs to achieve exponential convergence and facilitate data assimilation.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel meshless spectral approach that handles complex geometries and inverse problems efficiently using optimization and PINNs, with proven exponential convergence.

Findings

Optimization protocols achieve exponential convergence.

Method effectively incorporates data assimilation.

Applicable to a wide range of nonlinear PDEs.

Abstract

Solving inverse and optimization problems over solutions of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) on complex spatial domains is a long-standing challenge. Here we introduce a method that parameterizes the solution using spectral bases on arbitrary spatiotemporal domains, whereby the basis is defined on a hyperrectangle containing the true domain. We find the coefficients of the basis expansion by solving an optimization problem whereby both the equations, the boundary conditions and any optimization targets are enforced by a loss function, building on a key idea from Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs). Since the representation of the function natively has exponential convergence, so does the solution of the optimization problem, as long as it can be solved efficiently. We find empirically that the optimization protocols developed for machine learning find solutions with exponential convergence on a wide range of equations. The method naturally allows for the incorporation of data assimilation by including additional terms in the loss function, and for the efficient solution of optimization problems over the PDE solutions.