FP64 is All You Need: Rethinking Failure Modes in Physics-Informed Neural Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Chenhui, Liu, Dancheng, Nassereldine, Amir, Xiong, Jinjun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xu, Chenhui
Liu, Dancheng
Nassereldine, Amir
Xiong, Jinjun
author_facet Xu, Chenhui
Liu, Dancheng
Nassereldine, Amir
Xiong, Jinjun
contents Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) often exhibit failure modes in which the PDE residual loss converges while the solution error stays large, a phenomenon traditionally blamed on local optima separated from the true solution by steep loss barriers. We challenge this understanding by demonstrate that the real culprit is insufficient arithmetic precision: with standard FP32, the LBFGS optimizer prematurely satisfies its convergence test, freezing the network in a spurious failure phase. Simply upgrading to FP64 rescues optimization, enabling vanilla PINNs to solve PDEs without any failure modes. These results reframe PINN failure modes as precision induced stalls rather than inescapable local minima and expose a three stage training dynamic unconverged, failure, success whose boundaries shift with numerical precision. Our findings emphasize that rigorous arithmetic precision is the key to dependable PDE solving with neural networks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_10949
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FP64 is All You Need: Rethinking Failure Modes in Physics-Informed Neural Networks
Xu, Chenhui
Liu, Dancheng
Nassereldine, Amir
Xiong, Jinjun
Machine Learning
Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) often exhibit failure modes in which the PDE residual loss converges while the solution error stays large, a phenomenon traditionally blamed on local optima separated from the true solution by steep loss barriers. We challenge this understanding by demonstrate that the real culprit is insufficient arithmetic precision: with standard FP32, the LBFGS optimizer prematurely satisfies its convergence test, freezing the network in a spurious failure phase. Simply upgrading to FP64 rescues optimization, enabling vanilla PINNs to solve PDEs without any failure modes. These results reframe PINN failure modes as precision induced stalls rather than inescapable local minima and expose a three stage training dynamic unconverged, failure, success whose boundaries shift with numerical precision. Our findings emphasize that rigorous arithmetic precision is the key to dependable PDE solving with neural networks.
title FP64 is All You Need: Rethinking Failure Modes in Physics-Informed Neural Networks
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10949