Physics-Informed Neural Networks: A Didactic Derivation of the Complete Training Cycle

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteur principal: Tahimi, Abdeladhim
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Tahimi, Abdeladhim
author_facet Tahimi, Abdeladhim
contents This paper is a step-by-step, self-contained guide to the complete training cycle of a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) -- a topic that existing tutorials and guides typically delegate to automatic differentiation libraries without exposing the underlying algebra. Using a first-order initial value problem with a known analytical solution as a running example, we walk through every stage of the process: forward propagation of both the network output and its temporal derivative, evaluation of a composite loss function built from the ODE residual and the initial condition, backpropagation of gradients -- with particular attention to the product rule that arises in hidden layers -- and a gradient descent parameter update. Every calculation is presented with explicit, verifiable numerical values using a 1-3-3-1 multilayer perceptron with two hidden layers and 22 trainable parameters. From these concrete examples, we derive general recursive formulas -- expressed as sensitivity propagation relations -- that extend the gradient computation to networks of arbitrary depth, and we connect these formulas to the automatic differentiation engines used in practice. The trained network is then validated against the exact solution, achieving a relative $L^2$ error of $4.290 \times 10^{-4}$ using only the physics-informed loss, without any data from the true solution. A companion Jupyter/PyTorch notebook reproduces every manual calculation and the full training pipeline, providing mutual validation between hand-derived and machine-computed gradients.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_18481
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Physics-Informed Neural Networks: A Didactic Derivation of the Complete Training Cycle
Tahimi, Abdeladhim
Numerical Analysis
Machine Learning
65L05, 68T07, 65M99, 97M10
This paper is a step-by-step, self-contained guide to the complete training cycle of a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) -- a topic that existing tutorials and guides typically delegate to automatic differentiation libraries without exposing the underlying algebra. Using a first-order initial value problem with a known analytical solution as a running example, we walk through every stage of the process: forward propagation of both the network output and its temporal derivative, evaluation of a composite loss function built from the ODE residual and the initial condition, backpropagation of gradients -- with particular attention to the product rule that arises in hidden layers -- and a gradient descent parameter update. Every calculation is presented with explicit, verifiable numerical values using a 1-3-3-1 multilayer perceptron with two hidden layers and 22 trainable parameters. From these concrete examples, we derive general recursive formulas -- expressed as sensitivity propagation relations -- that extend the gradient computation to networks of arbitrary depth, and we connect these formulas to the automatic differentiation engines used in practice. The trained network is then validated against the exact solution, achieving a relative $L^2$ error of $4.290 \times 10^{-4}$ using only the physics-informed loss, without any data from the true solution. A companion Jupyter/PyTorch notebook reproduces every manual calculation and the full training pipeline, providing mutual validation between hand-derived and machine-computed gradients.
title Physics-Informed Neural Networks: A Didactic Derivation of the Complete Training Cycle
topic Numerical Analysis
Machine Learning
65L05, 68T07, 65M99, 97M10
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18481