Entropy-dissipation Informed Neural Network for McKean-Vlasov Type PDEs
Main Conference Track
Authors: Zebang Shen, Zhenfu Wang

The McKean-Vlasov equation (MVE) describes the collective behavior of particles subject to drift, diffusion, and mean-field interaction. In physical systems, the interaction term can be singular, i.e. it diverges when two particles collide. Notable examples of such interactions include the Coulomb interaction, fundamental in plasma physics, and the Biot-Savart interaction, present in the vorticity formulation of the 2D Navier-Stokes equation (NSE) in fluid dynamics. Solving MVEs that involve singular interaction kernels presents a significant challenge, especially when aiming to provide rigorous theoretical guarantees. In this work, we propose a novel approach based on the concept of entropy dissipation in the underlying system. We derive a potential function that effectively controls the KL divergence between a hypothesis solution and the ground truth. Building upon this theoretical foundation, we introduce the Entropy-dissipation Informed Neural Network (EINN) framework for solving MVEs. In EINN, we utilize neural networks (NN) to approximate the underlying velocity field and minimize the proposed potential function. By leveraging the expressive power of NNs, our approach offers a promising avenue for tackling the complexities associated with singular interactions. To assess the empirical performance of our method, we compare EINN with SOTA NN-based MVE solvers. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in solving MVEs across various example problems.