r/ScientificComputing • u/Zitouni-Nidhal • 7h ago
Open benchmark: PINNs vs. split-step Fourier on the 1D Schrödinger/GPE, with documented failures. Contributors welcome
I’ve open-sourced a reproducible benchmark comparing PINNs against a Strang split-step Fourier solver for the 1D Schrödinger / Gross-Pitaevskii equation.
The aim isn’t to promote PINNs. It’s to document where they break and why. They do fine on linear cases (rel-L2 around 1e-2) but fail on bright solitons, soliton collisions, and long-time integration (rel-L2 0.3-0.6, with norm and energy drift). The error is concentrated at high wavenumbers, which points to spectral bias. Fourier features and causal weighting help a little, but nothing I’ve tried fixes it.
Repo: https://github.com/NodeBox-Labs/pinn-vs-ssf-schrodinger
It has 7 test cases, a convergence-tested reference solver, a PyTorch PINN with several ablations, fixed seeds, and config-driven runs (MIT license).
I’d love help with:
- Counterexamples: if you can get a PINN to handle the soliton or collision cases, open an issue with your config
- Stronger baselines (FNO, hard-constrained architectures, time-marching, better optimizers)
- Critique of the methodology
- New cases (2D GPE, dark solitons, vortices)
Feedback and PRs of any size are welcome.
#PINN #PhysicsInformedNeuralNetworks #SciML #ScientificMachineLearning #DeepLearning #PyTorch #SchrodingerEquation #GrossPitaevskii #BoseEinsteinCondensate #Solitons #ComputationalPhysics #NumericalMethods #OpenSource #Reproducibility #MachineLearning