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Discussion
The training via differentiable physics as described so far allows us to integrate full numerical simulations and the training of deep neural networks interacting with these simulations. While we’ve only hinted at what could be achieved via DP approaches it is nonetheless a good time to summarize the pros and cons.
Alternatives - Noise
It is worth mentioning here that other works have proposed perturbing
the inputs and the iterations at training time with noise
{cite}sanchez2020learning (somewhat similar to regularizers
like dropout). This can help to prevent overfitting to the training
states, and hence shares similarities with the goals of training with
DP.
However, the noise is typically undirected, and hence not as accurate as training with the actual evolutions of simulations. Hence, this noise can be a good starting point for training that tends to overfit, but if possible, it is preferable to incorporate the actual solver in the training loop via a DP approach.
Summary
To summarize the pros and cons of training NNs via differentiable physics:
✅ Pro: - uses physical model and numerical methods for discretization - efficiency of selected methods carries over to training - tight coupling of physical models and NNs possible
❌ Con: - not compatible with all simulators (need to provide gradients) - require more heavy machinery (in terms of framework support) than previously discussed methods
Especially the last point is one that is bound to strongly improve in a fairly short time, but for now it’s important to keep in mind that not every simulator is suitable for DP training out of the box. Hence, in this book we’ll focus on examples using phiflow, which was designed for interfacing with deep learning frameworks. Next we can target more some complex scenarios to showcase what can be achieved with differentiable physics.