Deep adaptive sampling for surrogate modeling without labeled data

Surrogate modeling is of great practical significance for parametric differential equation systems. In contrast to classical numerical methods, using physics-informed deep learning methods to construct simulators for such systems is a promising direction due to its potential to handle high dimensionality, which requires minimizing a loss over a training set of random samples. However, the random samples introduce statistical errors, which may become the dominant errors for the approximation of low-regularity and high-dimensional problems. In this work, we present a deep adaptive sampling method for surrogate modeling (DAS2), where we generalize the deep adaptive sampling (DAS) method [62] [Tang, Wan and Yang, 2023] to build surrogate models for low-regularity parametric differential equations. In the parametric setting, the residual loss function can be regarded as an unnormalized probability density function (PDF) of the spatial and parametric variables. This PDF is approximated by a deep generative model, from which new samples are generated and added to the training set. Since the new samples match the residual-induced distribution, the refined training set can further reduce the statistical error in the current approximate solution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DAS2 with a series of numerical experiments, including the parametric lid-driven 2D cavity flow problem with a continuous range of Reynolds numbers from 100 to 1000.