Deep vs. Shallow: Benchmarking Physics-Informed Neural Architectures on the Biharmonic Equation

Partial differential equation (PDE) solvers are fundamental to engineering simulation. Classical mesh-based approaches (finite difference/volume/element) are fast and accurate on high-quality meshes but struggle with higher-order operators and complex, hard-to-mesh geometries. Recently developed physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and their variants are mesh-free and flexible, yet compute-intensive and often less accurate. This paper systematically benchmarks RBF-PIELM, a rapid PINN variant—an extreme learning machine with radial-basis activations—for higher-order PDEs. RBF-PIELM replaces PINNs' time-consuming gradient descent with a single-shot least-squares solve. We test RBF-PIELM on the fourth-order biharmonic equation using two benchmarks: lid-driven cavity flow (streamfunction formulation) and a manufactured oscillatory solution. Our results show up to $(350\times)$ faster training than PINNs and over $(10\times)$ fewer parameters for comparable solution accuracy. Despite surpassing PINNs, RBF-PIELM still lags mature mesh-based solvers and its accuracy degrades on highly oscillatory solutions, highlighting remaining challenges for practical deployment.