English

The Physics-Informed Neural Network Gravity Model: Generation III

Machine Learning 2025-02-05 v3 Geophysics

Abstract

Scientific machine learning and the advent of the Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) have shown high potential in their ability to solve complex differential equations. One example is the use of PINNs to solve the gravity field modeling problem -- learning convenient representations of the gravitational potential from position and acceleration data. These PINN gravity models, or PINN-GMs, have demonstrated advantages in model compactness, robustness to noise, and sample efficiency when compared to popular alternatives; however, further investigation has revealed various failure modes for these and other machine learning gravity models which this manuscript aims to address. Specifically, this paper introduces the third generation Physics-Informed Neural Network Gravity Model (PINN-GM-III) which includes design changes that solve the problems of feature divergence, bias towards low-altitude samples, numerical instability, and extrapolation error. Six evaluation metrics are proposed to expose these past pitfalls and illustrate the PINN-GM-III's robustness to them. This study concludes by evaluating the PINN-GM-III modeling accuracy on a heterogeneous density asteroid, and comparing its performance to other analytic and machine learning gravity models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2312.10257,
  title  = {The Physics-Informed Neural Network Gravity Model: Generation III},
  author = {John Martin and Hanspeter Schaub},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.10257},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

50 pages, 10 figures, submitted to The Journal of Astronautical Sciences

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:53:13.373Z