SympNets: Intrinsic structure-preserving symplectic networks for identifying Hamiltonian systems

We propose new symplectic networks (SympNets) for identifying Hamiltonian systems from data based on a composition of linear, activation and gradient modules. In particular, we define two classes of SympNets: the LA-SympNets composed of linear and activation modules, and the G-SympNets composed of gradient modules. Correspondingly, we prove two new universal approximation theorems that demonstrate that SympNets can approximate arbitrary symplectic maps based on appropriate activation functions. We then perform several experiments including the pendulum, double pendulum and three-body problems to investigate the expressivity and the generalization ability of SympNets. The simulation results show that even very small size SympNets can generalize well, and are able to handle both separable and non-separable Hamiltonian systems with data points resulting from short or long time steps. In all the test cases, SympNets outperform the baseline models, and are much faster in training and prediction. We also develop an extended version of SympNets to learn the dynamics from irregularly sampled data. This extended version of SympNets can be thought of as a universal model representing the solution to an arbitrary Hamiltonian system.