Inferring Underwater Topography with Finite Volume Neural Networks

Partial differential equations (PDEs) find applications across various scientific and engineering fields.There is a growing trend for integrating physics-aware machine learning models to solve PDEs.Among them, the Finite Volume Neural Network (FINN) has proven to be efficient in uncovering latent structures in data.This study explores the capabilities of FINN in the investigation of shallow-water equations, which simulate wave dynamics in coastal regions.Specifically, we investigate the efficacy of FINN in reconstructing underwater topography.We find that FINN excels at inferring topography solely from wave dynamics, stressing the importance of application-specific inductive bias in neural network architectures.