Abstract:We introduce FLASH-MAX, a shallow, exact-by-construction neural network architecture for predicting homogeneous electromagnetic fields from sparse pointwise observations. Each hidden neuron represents a separate exact solution to Maxwell's equations, so that the network satisfies the governing equations symbolically by construction and can be trained end-to-end from sparse data within seconds. We prove a universal approximation result showing that this exact model class remains universal on arbitrary domains. FLASH-MAX reaches sub-1% relative validation error from about 1K sparse pointwise observations in seconds, all while maintaining a zero PDE residual, and keeps single-digit errors even for only 100 observations sampled from 3D space. These results suggest that moving governing structure from the loss into the hypothesis class can dramatically improve the trade-off between precision and optimization speed in scientific machine learning.
Abstract:We present a new benchmarking study comparing a boundary-constrained Ehrenpreis--Palamodov Gaussian Process (B-EPGP) surrogate with a classical finite element method combined with Crank--Nicolson time stepping (CN-FEM) for solving the two-dimensional wave equation with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. The B-EPGP construction leverages exponential-polynomial bases derived from the characteristic variety to enforce the PDE and boundary conditions exactly and employs penalized least squares to estimate the coefficients. To ensure fairness across paradigms, we introduce a degrees-of-freedom (DoF) matching protocol. Under matched DoF, B-EPGP consistently attains lower space-time $L^2$-error and maximum-in-time $L^{2}$-error in space than CN-FEM, improving accuracy by roughly two orders of magnitude.