PAS-Net: Physics-informed Adaptive Scale Deep Operator Network

TL;DR

PAS-Net is a physics-informed neural network architecture that incorporates adaptive multiscale features to efficiently learn solutions of complex nonlinear PDEs with localized and stiff dynamics, outperforming existing models.

Contribution

It introduces an adaptive-scale embedding in DeepONet that enhances multiscale representation and accelerates training through NTK spectral conditioning improvements.

Findings

Higher accuracy on benchmark PDE problems

Faster convergence compared to standard DeepONet

Effective handling of localized and stiff features

Abstract

Nonlinear physical phenomena often show complex multiscale interactions; motivated by the principles of multiscale modeling in scientific computing, we propose PAS-Net, a physics-informed Adaptive-Scale Deep Operator Network for learning solution operators of nonlinear and singularly perturbed evolution PDEs with small parameters and localized features. Specifically, PAS-Net augments the trunk input in the physics informed Deep Operator Network (PI-DeepONet) with a prescribed (or learnable) locally rescaled coordinate transformation centered at reference points. This addition introduces a multiscale feature embedding that acts as an architecture-independent preconditioner which improves the representation of localized, stiff, and multiscale dynamics. From an optimization perspective, the adaptive-scale embedding in PAS-Net modifies the geometry of the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) associated with the neural network by increasing its smallest eigenvalue, which in turn improves spectral conditioning and accelerates gradient-based convergence. We further show that this adaptive-scale mechanism explicitly accelerates neural network training in approximating functions with steep transitions and strong asymptotic behavior, and we provide a rigorous proof of this function-approximation result within the finite-dimensional NTK matrix framework. We test the proposed PAS-Net on three different problems: (i) the one-dimensional viscous Burgers equation, (ii) a nonlinear diffusion-reaction system with sharp spatial gradients, and (iii) a two-dimensional eikonal equation. The numerical results show that PAS-Net consistently achieves higher accuracy and faster convergence than the standard DeepONet and PI-DeepONet models under a similar training cost.