Chebyshev Center-Based Direction Selection for Multi-Objective Optimization and Training PINNs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a geometric approach based on Chebyshev centers for selecting update directions in training PINNs, leading to improved convergence and interpretability.

Contribution

It formulates PINN training as a Chebyshev-center problem, unifying and generalizing existing direction selection methods with theoretical guarantees.

Findings

The method guarantees convergence in nonconvex settings.

It recovers desirable properties of existing approaches through a single geometric criterion.

Experiments show strong empirical performance on PINN benchmarks.

Abstract

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are a promising approach for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). Their training, however, is often difficult because multiple loss terms induced by PDE residuals and boundary or initial conditions must be optimized simultaneously. To address this difficulty, existing approaches often construct update directions by explicitly enforcing particular desirable properties, such as scale robustness and simultaneous descent. While effective in many cases, such property-by-property designs can make it unclear which conditions are essential, what geometric principle determines the selected update direction, and how different methods are structurally related. In this work, we formulate update-direction selection for PINN training as a Chebyshev-center problem in the dual cone. The proposed formulation selects a normalized direction that maximizes the minimum distance to the cone facets. The resulting formulation admits an efficient dual problem in a much lower-dimensional space and yields a convergence guarantee in the nonconvex setting. It also recovers the key desirable properties targeted by existing approaches without imposing them separately; rather, they follow from the single geometric criterion underlying the formulation. This makes the selected direction interpretable through a single geometric rule and provides a unified basis for systematically comparing related direction-selection methods. Experiments on several PINN benchmarks further demonstrate strong empirical performance of the proposed method.