PE-EK-PINN: Physics Embedding with Evolving Kernel for Scalable Physics-Informed Neural Networks

Abstract

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) embed governing equations into deep learning, but enforce them only through loss residuals, leaving highly oscillatory wave behavior to be discovered by optimization. As a result, methods that achieve relative $L_2$ errors below $10^{-3}$ on standard manufactured Helmholtz benchmarks can fail on practical radiation problems involving singular excitations, absorbing boundaries, and wave fields spanning tens of wavelengths. Architectural physics embedding addresses this limitation by factorizing the field into analytically derived oscillatory kernels and learnable envelopes. However, the kernel dictionary must be manually constructed and scales with the number of elementary units, growing exponentially with the depth of hierarchically structured systems such as antenna arrays and metasurfaces. We propose PE-EK-PINN (Physics Embedded with Evolving Kernels), which treats physics kernels as reusable learned representations rather than fixed analytical inputs. A converged subsystem field is frozen and promoted to an evolved kernel, whose transformed copies are reused to represent higher-level configurations without deriving new governing equations. The resulting hierarchy makes the peak number of active kernels independent of system size and reduces cumulative training cost from $O(N)$ to $O(\log N)$. Experiments on dipole arrays, composite line-source geometries, and cross arrays demonstrate the dramatic training cost reduction, while achieving a reduced or comparable relative $L_2$ error. One notable example is PE-EK-PINN solves a $256$-dipole array more than 30 times faster than direct PE-PINN.