PINNsFormer: A Transformer-Based Framework For Physics-Informed Neural Networks

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have emerged as a promising deep learning framework for approximating numerical solutions for partial differential equations (PDEs). While conventional PINNs and most related studies adopt fully-connected multilayer perceptrons (MLP) as the backbone structure, they have neglected the temporal relations in PDEs and failed to approximate the true solution. In this paper, we propose a novel Transformer-based framework, namely PINNsFormer, that accurately approximates PDEs' solutions by capturing the temporal dependencies with multi-head attention mechanisms in Transformer-based models. Instead of approximating point predictions, PINNsFormer adapts input vectors to pseudo sequences and point-wise PINNs loss to a sequential PINNs loss. In addition, PINNsFormer is equipped with a novel activation function, namely Wavelet, which anticipates the Fourier decomposition through deep neural networks. We empirically demonstrate PINNsFormer's ability to capture the PDE solutions for various scenarios, in which conventional PINNs have failed to learn. We also show that PINNsFormer achieves superior approximation accuracy on such problems than conventional PINNs with non-sensitive hyperparameters, in trade of marginal computational and memory costs, with extensive experiments.