Gradient Enhanced Self-Training Physics-Informed Neural Network (gST-PINN) for Solving Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations

Partial differential equations (PDEs) provide a mathematical foundation for simulating and understanding intricate behaviors in both physical sciences and engineering. With the growing capabilities of deep learning, data-driven approaches like Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have been developed, offering a mesh-free, analytic type framework for efficiently solving PDEs across a wide range of applications. However, traditional PINNs often struggle with challenges such as limited precision, slow training dynamics, lack of labeled data availability, and inadequate handling of multi-physics interactions. To overcome these challenging issues of PINNs, we proposed a Gradient Enhanced Self-Training PINN (gST-PINN) method that specifically introduces a gradient based pseudo point self-learning algorithm for solving PDEs. We tested the proposed method on three different types of PDE problems from various fields, each representing distinct scenarios. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evident, as the PINN approach for solving the Burgers' equation attains a mean square error (MSE) on the order of 10-3, while the diffusion-sorption equation achieves an MSE on the order of 10-4 after 12,500 iterations, with no further improvement as the iterations increase. In contrast, the MSE for both PDEs in the gST-PINN model continues to decrease, demonstrating better generalization and reaching an MSE on the order of 10-5 after 18,500 iterations. Furthermore, the results show that the proposed purely semi-supervised gST-PINN consistently outperforms the standard PINN method in all cases, even when solution of the PDEs are unavailable. It generalizes both PINN and Gradient-enhanced PINN (gPINN), and can be effectively applied in scenarios prone to low accuracy and convergence issues, particularly in the absence of labeled data.