Learnable Viscosity Modulation in Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Incompressible Flow Reconstruction

TL;DR

This paper introduces LVM-PINN, a neural network framework that adaptively modulates viscosity to improve stability and accuracy in reconstructing incompressible flows from sparse or noisy data.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel learnable viscosity modulation mechanism integrated into PINNs, enhancing stability and accuracy in flow reconstruction tasks.

Findings

LVM-PINN achieves more stable training behavior.

LVM-PINN provides more accurate flow reconstructions.

The method performs well under sparse and noisy data conditions.

Abstract

Accurately and stably solving the incompressible Navier--Stokes equations with physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) remains challenging, particularly for sparse or noisy observations and for flow regimes in which the local balance among convection, diffusion, and pressure is difficult to capture. To address this issue, we propose a framework, denoted as LVM-PINN, which incorporates a learnable viscosity modulation (LVM) mechanism into the PINN residual. Specifically, the model predicts a spatiotemporal scalar field that is embedded directly into the viscous diffusion term of the momentum equations, thereby enabling adaptive modulation of the local dissipation strength during training. This modification improves optimization stability while enhancing the representation of complex flow structures. The effect of the proposed mechanism is further examined through a controlled ablation setting with an otherwise unchanged network architecture, as well as through comparisons with GRU- and residual-attention-based backbone baselines. Numerical experiments on two-dimensional benchmark problems, including the Kovasznay flow and two manufactured forcing flows, show that the proposed framework yields more stable training behavior and more accurate flow reconstruction under sparse and noisy data conditions.