Analyzing the Performance of Deep Encoder-Decoder Networks as Surrogates for a Diffusion Equation

Neural networks (NNs) have proven to be a viable alternative to traditional direct numerical algorithms, with the potential to accelerate computational time by several orders of magnitude. In the present paper we study the use of encoder-decoder convolutional neural network (CNN) as surrogates for steady-state diffusion solvers. The construction of such surrogates requires the selection of an appropriate task, network architecture, training set structure and size, loss function, and training algorithm hyperparameters. It is well known that each of these factors can have a significant impact on the performance of the resultant model. Our approach employs an encoder-decoder CNN architecture, which we posit is particularly well-suited for this task due to its ability to effectively transform data, as opposed to merely compressing it. We systematically evaluate a range of loss functions, hyperparameters, and training set sizes. Our results indicate that increasing the size of the training set has a substantial effect on reducing performance fluctuations and overall error. Additionally, we observe that the performance of the model exhibits a logarithmic dependence on the training set size. Furthermore, we investigate the effect on model performance by using different subsets of data with varying features. Our results highlight the importance of sampling the configurational space in an optimal manner, as this can have a significant impact on the performance of the model and the required training time. In conclusion, our results suggest that training a model with a pre-determined error performance bound is not a viable approach, as it does not guarantee that edge cases with errors larger than the bound do not exist. Furthermore, as most surrogate tasks involve a high dimensional landscape, an ever increasing training set size is, in principle, needed, however it is not a practical solution.