Overcoming PINNs Failure Modes In High Dimension With Low-Rank Fourier Sum

Abstract

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) can be unreliable on PDEs with oscillatory, multiscale, stiff, or long-time solutions, and these difficulties worsen in high dimensions where collocation-based training yields large numerical integration error and high-variance gradients. We propose Low-Rank Fourier Sums (LoRFS), representing the solution as a low-rank sum of separable Fourier expansions (products of one-dimensional Fourier series across coordinates). This makes high-frequency structure explicit and enables closed-form evaluation of common physics-based objectives and their gradients (e.g., $L^2$ residual and variational losses), replacing sampling-based collocation estimates with analytic loss evaluation and eliminating sampling noise. We further provide theoretical results that clarify why LoRFS is particularly well suited to high-dimensional regimes. Across canonical PINN failure-mode benchmarks and their high-dimensional extensions, LoRFS consistently outperforms strong PINN baselines and remains stable in regimes where competing methods degrade.