Neural Field Thermal Tomography: A Differentiable Physics Framework for Non-Destructive Evaluation

arXiv:2603.11045v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inverse problems for stiff parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs), such as the inverse heat conduction problem (IHCP), are severely ill-posed: the forward map rapidly damps high-frequency interior structure before it reaches the boundary. Soft-constrained physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), which embed the PDE as a residual penalty, suffer from gradient pathology in this regime and tend to fit boundary measurements while le