The growing computational demands of artificial intelligence (AI) in addressing climate change raise significant concerns about inefficiencies and environmental impact, as highlighted by the Jevons paradox. We propose an attention-enhanced quantum physics-informed neural networks model (AQ-PINNs) to tackle these challenges. This approach integrates quantum computing techniques into physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for climate modeling, aiming to enhance predictive accuracy in fluid dynamics governed by the Navier-Stokes equations while reducing the computational burden and carbon footprint. By harnessing variational quantum multi-head self-attention mechanisms, our AQ-PINNs achieve a 51.51% reduction in model parameters compared to classical multi-head self-attention methods while maintaining comparable convergence and loss. It also employs quantum tensor networks to enhance representational capacity, which can lead to more efficient gradient computations and reduced susceptibility to barren plateaus. Our AQ-PINNs represent a crucial step towards more sustainable and effective climate modeling solutions.
The growing computational demands of artificial intelligence (AI) in addressing climate change raise significant concerns about inefficiencies and environmental impact, as highlighted by the Jevons paradox. We propose an attention-enhanced quantum physics-informed neural networks model (AQ-PINNs) to tackle these challenges. This approach integrates quantum computing techniques into physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for climate modeling, aiming to enhance predictive accuracy in fluid dynamics governed by the Navier-Stokes equations while reducing the computational burden and carbon footprint. By harnessing variational quantum multi-head self-attention mechanisms, our AQ-PINNs achieve a 51.51% reduction in model parameters compared to classical multi-head self-attention methods while maintaining comparable convergence and loss. It also employs quantum tensor networks to enhance representational capacity, which can lead to more efficient gradient computations and reduced susceptibility to barren plateaus. Our AQ-PINNs represent a crucial step towards more sustainable and effective climate modeling solutions.
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a versatile approach for solving nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs), yet achieving high accuracy efficiently using these techniques remains challenging for high-dimensional or multiscale systems. Here, we present a hybrid quantum-classical framework that enhances Quantum PINNs (QPINNs) through adaptive collocation point sampling and loss-aware attention mechanisms. By dynamically prioritizing points in regions with large PDE residuals or steep solution gradients, our method mitigates the spectral bias inherent in conventional PINNs. Current Quantum Physics-Informed Neural Networks are commonly assumed to be limited by the expressive power of quantum circuits. In our work, we observed that, across diverse differential equations, optimization - not only expressivity - can be an important bottleneck. Furthermore, a trainable loss-weighting scheme balances contributions from physics residuals, boundary conditions, and data fidelity during training. Integrating these strategies with quantum computing techniques (including variational quantum circuits and quantum gradient estimation) can yield at least a 60% improvement in solution accuracy under specific regimes for benchmark fluid flows and reaction-diffusion systems. Finally, we argue that merely increasing model expressivity is insufficient for resolving complex PDEs via QPINNs, as they remain constrained by the structural optimization limitations of classical PINNs. This framework provides a scalable pathway for quantum-enhanced scientific machine learning, bridging physics-based modeling with emerging quantum computational capabilities.
Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) is a powerful method in computer-aided engineering (CAE), especially for design space exploration studies (like surrogate modeling and design of experiments), that combines deep learning with physics-based modeling. Though PINN is in a nascent stage, its success hinges on two key factors - generalizability and training efficiency. One common aspect of these factors is trainable parameters. The goal of this study is to improve these two factors by the introduction of Quantum Machine Learning in a classical PINN framework. This study proposes a Quantum-Assisted PINN (QA-PINN) to reduce the trainable parameters while maintaining accuracy. The study utilized a standard forward problem of simulating partial differential equations (PDEs) from the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), a well-understood area with classical PINN. A comparative analysis was performed between QA-PINN, equivalent classical vanilla PINN (c-PINN), and state-of-the-art classical PINN - Globally Adaptive Activation Function PINN (GAAF-PINN). All methods were benchmarked against the ground-truth analytical solution for 1D Burger's equation. The analysis is conducted for 3, 4, and 5-qubit QA-PINN architectures. In comparison to c-PINN and GAAF-PINN, 4 and 5-qubit QA-PINN is shown to reduce the number of trainable parameters of the network by 20%, and while maintaining the accuracy. The reduced number of trainable parameters indicates the reduced complexity of the model and the reduced risk of overfitting, making it more generalizable. Thus, the proposed approach can have a significant impact on PINNs enhancing generalization and improving training efficiency for deploying the model for real-world applications.
We propose a Hybrid Quantum-Classical Physics-Informed Neural Network (HQC-PINN) that integrates parameterized variational quantum circuits into the PINN framework for hydrological PDE-constrained learning. Our architecture encodes multi-source remote sensing features into quantum states via trainable angle encoding, processes them through a hardware-efficient variational ansatz with entangling layers, and constrains the output using the Saint-Venant shallow water equations and Manning's flow equation as differentiable physics loss terms. The inherent stochasticity of quantum measurement provides a natural mechanism for uncertainty quantification without requiring explicit Bayesian inference machinery. We further introduce a quantum transfer learning protocol that pre-trains on multi-hazard disaster data before fine-tuning on flood-specific events. Numerical simulations on multi-modal satellite and meteorological data from the Kalu River basin, Sri Lanka, show that the HQC-PINN achieves convergence in ~3x fewer training epochs and uses ~44% fewer trainable parameters compared to an equivalent classical PINN, while maintaining competitive classification accuracy. Theoretical analysis indicates that hydrological physics constraints narrow the effective optimization landscape, providing a natural mitigation against barren plateaus in variational quantum circuits. This work establishes the first application of quantum-enhanced physics-informed learning to hydrological prediction and demonstrates a viable path toward quantum advantage in environmental science.
Abstract Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have emerged as a promising approach for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) by embedding the governing physics into the loss function associated with a deep neural network. In this work, a Quantum Physics-Informed Neural Network (QPINN) framework is proposed to solve two-dimensional (2D) time-dependent Maxwell’s equations. Our approach utilizes a parametrized quantum circuit (PQC) in conjunction with the classical neural network architecture and enforces physical laws, including a global energy conservation principle, during training. A quantum simulation library, TorQ - Tensor Operations for Research in Quantum systems , was developed to efficiently compute circuit outputs and derivatives by leveraging GPU acceleration based on PyTorch, enabling end-to-end training of the QPINN. The method was evaluated on two 2D electromagnetic wave propagation problems: one in free space (vacuum) and the other has an added dielectric medium. Multiple quantum circuit ansätze, input scales, and an added loss term were compared in a thorough ablation study. Furthermore, recent techniques to enhance PINN convergence, including random Fourier feature embeddings and adaptive time weighting, have been incorporated. Our results demonstrate that the QPINN achieves accuracy comparable to, and even greater than, the classical PINN baseline, while using a significantly smaller number of trainable parameters. This study also demonstrates that adding an energy conservation term to the loss stabilizes training and improves the physical fidelity of the solution in the lossless free-space case. This added term helps mitigate a new kind of barren plateau (BP) related phenomenon - “black hole” (BH) loss landscape for the quantum experiments in that scenario. By optimizing the quantum-circuit ansatz and embedding energy-conservation constraints, our QPINN achieves up to a 19% higher accuracy on 2D Maxwell benchmark problems compared to a classical PINN.
Abstract Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as promising methods for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) by embedding physical laws within neural architectures. However, these classical approaches often require a large number of parameters to achieve reasonable accuracy, particularly for complex PDEs. In this paper, we present a quantum-classical PINNs (QCPINNs) that combines quantum and classical components, allowing us to solve PDEs with significantly fewer parameters while maintaining comparable accuracy and convergence to classical PINNs. We systematically evaluated two quantum circuit architectures across various configurations on five benchmark PDEs to identify optimal QCPINN designs. Our results demonstrate that the QCPINN achieves stable convergence and comparable accuracy, while using only 10%–30% of the trainable parameters required by classical PINNs. This approach also results in a significant reduction in the relative L 2 error for Helmholtz, Klein–Gordon, and Convection–diffusion equations, with reduction ranging from 4% to 64% across various fields. These findings demonstrate the potential of parameter efficiency and solution accuracy in physics-informed machine learning, allowing for a substantial decrease in model complexity without compromising solution quality.
Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) embed the governing differential equation in their loss function, but often require thousands of trainable parameters. We introduce a Quantum-enhanced PINN (QPINN) in which a single classical hidden layer is replaced by a four-qubit Variational Quantum Circuit (VQC). Two one-dimensional wave-propagation problems validate the approach. In a Hardy-constrained wave-equation test, the QPINN achieved lower error rates while using 71% fewer parameters than the classical PINN. A second experiment with Gaussian-pulse excitation showed similar results: the hybrid model obtained improved accuracy with approximately 70% parameter reduction. These results demonstrate the viability of quantum layers as feature extractors in PINN architectures.