MetaPhysiCa: Improving OOD Robustness in Physics-Informed Machine Learning

Abstract

A fundamental challenge in physics-informed machine learning (PIML) is the design of robust PIML methods for out-of-distribution (OOD) forecasting tasks. These OOD tasks require learning-to-learn from observations of the same (ODE) dynamical system with different unknown ODE parameters, and demand accurate forecasts even under out-of-support initial conditions and out-of-support ODE parameters. In this work we propose to improve the OOD robustness of PIML via a meta-learning procedure for causal structure discovery. Using three different OOD tasks, we empirically observe that the proposed approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art PIML and deep learning methods (with $2\times$ to $28\times$ lower OOD errors).