Efficient Shallow Ritz Method For 1D Diffusion-Reaction Problems

This paper studies the shallow Ritz method for solving one-dimensional diffusion-reaction problems. The method is capable of improving the order of approximation for non-smooth problems. By following a similar approach to the one presented in [9], we present a damped block Newton (dBN) method to achieve nearly optimal order of approximation. The dBN method optimizes the Ritz functional by alternating between the linear and non-linear parameters of the shallow ReLU neural network (NN). For diffusion-reaction problems, new difficulties arise: (1) for the linear parameters, the mass matrix is dense and even more ill-conditioned than the stiffness matrix, and (2) for the non-linear parameters, the Hessian matrix is dense and may be singular. This paper addresses these challenges, resulting in a dBN method with computational cost of ${\cal O}(n)$.The ideas presented for diffusion-reaction problems can also be applied to least-squares approximation problems. For both applications, starting with the non-linear parameters as a uniform partition, numerical experiments show that the dBN method moves the mesh points to nearly optimal locations.

@article{cai2025_2407.01496,
  title={ Efficient Shallow Ritz Method For 1D Diffusion-Reaction Problems },
  author={ Zhiqiang Cai and Anastassia Doktorova and Robert D. Falgout and César Herrera },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.01496},
  year={ 2025 }
}