GAC-PINN: Geometry-Adaptive and Constraint-Enhanced Physics-Informed Neural Networks
Yanxin Zhang, Yong Zhang, Houbiao Li
Abstract
For systems with steep gradients, sharp interfaces, or severe spatio-temporal coupling, Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) suffer from spectral bias, geometric inflexibility, and boundary constraint conflicts, which undermine accuracy and convergence. To overcome these issues, we propose a geometry-adaptive and constraint-enhanced PINN (GAC-PINN). The framework comprises four components: a gradient-driven adaptive grid mapping (AGM) for diffeomorphic point concentration with Jacobian regularization, an adaptive bandwidth hard-constraint ansatz with spatially-varying boundary transition widths, a Gaussian Fourier feature mapping as a spectral preconditioner to further enhance high-wavenumber representation, and an operator-aware router that automatically selects the appropriate hard-constraint construction based on whether the governing PDE contains temporal derivatives. An AGM callback mechanism and a three-stage training strategy ensure stable coordination. Benchmarks including the viscous Burgers equation, a sharp-peaked 2D Poisson problem, and the Allen-Cahn phase-transition equation show that GAC-PINN attains relative (L^2) errors of ((1.747\pm 0.450)\times 10^{-4}), ((2.868\pm 0.947)\times 10^{-5}), and ((1.756 \pm 0.712)\times 10^{-3}), respectively, consistently outperforming the baselines. Ablation studies further reveal that AGM alone yields a substantially lower error than residual-based adaptive refinement (RAR), while RAR becomes beneficial only when combined with FFM, demonstrating a context-dependent module interaction. Convergence analysis verifies rapid error reduction and saturation with increasing resolution, establishing a practical adaptive framework for high-fidelity simulation of problems with localized sharp features in applied mechanics and computational physics.