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SubscribeGaussian Process Priors for Systems of Linear Partial Differential Equations with Constant Coefficients
Partial differential equations (PDEs) are important tools to model physical systems, and including them into machine learning models is an important way of incorporating physical knowledge. Given any system of linear PDEs with constant coefficients, we propose a family of Gaussian process (GP) priors, which we call EPGP, such that all realizations are exact solutions of this system. We apply the Ehrenpreis-Palamodov fundamental principle, which works like a non-linear Fourier transform, to construct GP kernels mirroring standard spectral methods for GPs. Our approach can infer probable solutions of linear PDE systems from any data such as noisy measurements, or pointwise defined initial and boundary conditions. Constructing EPGP-priors is algorithmic, generally applicable, and comes with a sparse version (S-EPGP) that learns the relevant spectral frequencies and works better for big data sets. We demonstrate our approach on three families of systems of PDE, the heat equation, wave equation, and Maxwell's equations, where we improve upon the state of the art in computation time and precision, in some experiments by several orders of magnitude.
Fourier Neural Operator for Parametric Partial Differential Equations
The classical development of neural networks has primarily focused on learning mappings between finite-dimensional Euclidean spaces. Recently, this has been generalized to neural operators that learn mappings between function spaces. For partial differential equations (PDEs), neural operators directly learn the mapping from any functional parametric dependence to the solution. Thus, they learn an entire family of PDEs, in contrast to classical methods which solve one instance of the equation. In this work, we formulate a new neural operator by parameterizing the integral kernel directly in Fourier space, allowing for an expressive and efficient architecture. We perform experiments on Burgers' equation, Darcy flow, and Navier-Stokes equation. The Fourier neural operator is the first ML-based method to successfully model turbulent flows with zero-shot super-resolution. It is up to three orders of magnitude faster compared to traditional PDE solvers. Additionally, it achieves superior accuracy compared to previous learning-based solvers under fixed resolution.
Breakeven complexity: A new perspective on neural partial differential equation solvers
Neural surrogate solvers of partial differential equations (PDEs) promise dramatic speedups over numerical methods, especially in scenarios requiring many solves. However, current accuracy-based evaluations do not fully consider two central issues: (1) neural solvers incur substantial up-front costs for data generation, training, and tuning; and (2) classical solvers can also generate low-fidelity solutions at a sufficiently low simulation cost. To explicitly account for these realities and fully incorporate end-to-end costs, we propose an evaluation framework centered on breakeven complexity, a metric that counts the forward solves before a learned solver is cost-effective relative to an error-equivalent traditional solver. To evaluate this measure, we apply scaling laws to determine how much training budget to allocate to data generation and discuss how to achieve smooth error-matching in diverse settings. We evaluate the breakeven complexity of multiple neural PDE solvers on three PDEs on 2D periodic domains from APEBench and a novel benchmark of flows past multiple obstacles generated by the GPU-native PyFR code. Among other findings, our results suggest that neural PDE solvers become more effective as problems get harder in terms of cost, dimension, rollout, physics regime (e.g. higher Reynolds number), etc.
Specializations of partial differential equations for Feynman integrals
Starting from the Mellin-Barnes integral representation of a Feynman integral depending on set of kinematic variables z_i, we derive a system of partial differential equations w.r.t.\ new variables x_j, which parameterize the differentiable constraints z_i=y_i(x_j). In our algorithm, the powers of propagators can be considered as arbitrary parameters. Our algorithm can also be used for the reduction of multiple hypergeometric sums to sums of lower dimension, finding special values and reduction equations of hypergeometric functions in a singular locus of continuous variables, or finding systems of partial differential equations for master integrals with arbitrary powers of propagators. As an illustration, we produce a differential equation of fourth order in one variable for the one-loop two-point Feynman diagram with two different masses and arbitrary propagator powers.
Group Equivariant Fourier Neural Operators for Partial Differential Equations
We consider solving partial differential equations (PDEs) with Fourier neural operators (FNOs), which operate in the frequency domain. Since the laws of physics do not depend on the coordinate system used to describe them, it is desirable to encode such symmetries in the neural operator architecture for better performance and easier learning. While encoding symmetries in the physical domain using group theory has been studied extensively, how to capture symmetries in the frequency domain is under-explored. In this work, we extend group convolutions to the frequency domain and design Fourier layers that are equivariant to rotations, translations, and reflections by leveraging the equivariance property of the Fourier transform. The resulting G-FNO architecture generalizes well across input resolutions and performs well in settings with varying levels of symmetry. Our code is publicly available as part of the AIRS library (https://github.com/divelab/AIRS).
Self-Supervised Learning with Lie Symmetries for Partial Differential Equations
Machine learning for differential equations paves the way for computationally efficient alternatives to numerical solvers, with potentially broad impacts in science and engineering. Though current algorithms typically require simulated training data tailored to a given setting, one may instead wish to learn useful information from heterogeneous sources, or from real dynamical systems observations that are messy or incomplete. In this work, we learn general-purpose representations of PDEs from heterogeneous data by implementing joint embedding methods for self-supervised learning (SSL), a framework for unsupervised representation learning that has had notable success in computer vision. Our representation outperforms baseline approaches to invariant tasks, such as regressing the coefficients of a PDE, while also improving the time-stepping performance of neural solvers. We hope that our proposed methodology will prove useful in the eventual development of general-purpose foundation models for PDEs.
Random Grid Neural Processes for Parametric Partial Differential Equations
We introduce a new class of spatially stochastic physics and data informed deep latent models for parametric partial differential equations (PDEs) which operate through scalable variational neural processes. We achieve this by assigning probability measures to the spatial domain, which allows us to treat collocation grids probabilistically as random variables to be marginalised out. Adapting this spatial statistics view, we solve forward and inverse problems for parametric PDEs in a way that leads to the construction of Gaussian process models of solution fields. The implementation of these random grids poses a unique set of challenges for inverse physics informed deep learning frameworks and we propose a new architecture called Grid Invariant Convolutional Networks (GICNets) to overcome these challenges. We further show how to incorporate noisy data in a principled manner into our physics informed model to improve predictions for problems where data may be available but whose measurement location does not coincide with any fixed mesh or grid. The proposed method is tested on a nonlinear Poisson problem, Burgers equation, and Navier-Stokes equations, and we provide extensive numerical comparisons. We demonstrate significant computational advantages over current physics informed neural learning methods for parametric PDEs while improving the predictive capabilities and flexibility of these models.
Finite Difference Neural Networks: Fast Prediction of Partial Differential Equations
Discovering the underlying behavior of complex systems is an important topic in many science and engineering disciplines. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network framework, finite difference neural networks (FDNet), to learn partial differential equations from data. Specifically, our proposed finite difference inspired network is designed to learn the underlying governing partial differential equations from trajectory data, and to iteratively estimate the future dynamical behavior using only a few trainable parameters. We illustrate the performance (predictive power) of our framework on the heat equation, with and without noise and/or forcing, and compare our results to the Forward Euler method. Moreover, we show the advantages of using a Hessian-Free Trust Region method to train the network.
SineNet: Learning Temporal Dynamics in Time-Dependent Partial Differential Equations
We consider using deep neural networks to solve time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs), where multi-scale processing is crucial for modeling complex, time-evolving dynamics. While the U-Net architecture with skip connections is commonly used by prior studies to enable multi-scale processing, our analysis shows that the need for features to evolve across layers results in temporally misaligned features in skip connections, which limits the model's performance. To address this limitation, we propose SineNet, consisting of multiple sequentially connected U-shaped network blocks, referred to as waves. In SineNet, high-resolution features are evolved progressively through multiple stages, thereby reducing the amount of misalignment within each stage. We furthermore analyze the role of skip connections in enabling both parallel and sequential processing of multi-scale information. Our method is rigorously tested on multiple PDE datasets, including the Navier-Stokes equations and shallow water equations, showcasing the advantages of our proposed approach over conventional U-Nets with a comparable parameter budget. We further demonstrate that increasing the number of waves in SineNet while maintaining the same number of parameters leads to a monotonically improved performance. The results highlight the effectiveness of SineNet and the potential of our approach in advancing the state-of-the-art in neural PDE solver design. Our code is available as part of AIRS (https://github.com/divelab/AIRS).
Quantum-inspired variational algorithms for partial differential equations: Application to financial derivative pricing
Variational quantum Monte Carlo (VMC) combined with neural-network quantum states offers a novel angle of attack on the curse-of-dimensionality encountered in a particular class of partial differential equations (PDEs); namely, the real- and imaginary time-dependent Schrödinger equation. In this paper, we present a simple generalization of VMC applicable to arbitrary time-dependent PDEs, showcasing the technique in the multi-asset Black-Scholes PDE for pricing European options contingent on many correlated underlying assets.
ConDiff: A Challenging Dataset for Neural Solvers of Partial Differential Equations
We present ConDiff, a novel dataset for scientific machine learning. ConDiff focuses on the parametric diffusion equation with space dependent coefficients, a fundamental problem in many applications of partial differential equations (PDEs). The main novelty of the proposed dataset is that we consider discontinuous coefficients with high contrast. These coefficient functions are sampled from a selected set of distributions. This class of problems is not only of great academic interest, but is also the basis for describing various environmental and industrial problems. In this way, ConDiff shortens the gap with real-world problems while remaining fully synthetic and easy to use. ConDiff consists of a diverse set of diffusion equations with coefficients covering a wide range of contrast levels and heterogeneity with a measurable complexity metric for clearer comparison between different coefficient functions. We baseline ConDiff on standard deep learning models in the field of scientific machine learning. By providing a large number of problem instances, each with its own coefficient function and right-hand side, we hope to encourage the development of novel physics-based deep learning approaches, such as neural operators, ultimately driving progress towards more accurate and efficient solutions of complex PDE problems.
LordNet: An Efficient Neural Network for Learning to Solve Parametric Partial Differential Equations without Simulated Data
Neural operators, as a powerful approximation to the non-linear operators between infinite-dimensional function spaces, have proved to be promising in accelerating the solution of partial differential equations (PDE). However, it requires a large amount of simulated data, which can be costly to collect. This can be avoided by learning physics from the physics-constrained loss, which we refer to it as mean squared residual (MSR) loss constructed by the discretized PDE. We investigate the physical information in the MSR loss, which we called long-range entanglements, and identify the challenge that the neural network requires the capacity to model the long-range entanglements in the spatial domain of the PDE, whose patterns vary in different PDEs. To tackle the challenge, we propose LordNet, a tunable and efficient neural network for modeling various entanglements. Inspired by the traditional solvers, LordNet models the long-range entanglements with a series of matrix multiplications, which can be seen as the low-rank approximation to the general fully-connected layers and extracts the dominant pattern with reduced computational cost. The experiments on solving Poisson's equation and (2D and 3D) Navier-Stokes equation demonstrate that the long-range entanglements from the MSR loss can be well modeled by the LordNet, yielding better accuracy and generalization ability than other neural networks. The results show that the Lordnet can be 40times faster than traditional PDE solvers. In addition, LordNet outperforms other modern neural network architectures in accuracy and efficiency with the smallest parameter size.
Stacked tensorial neural networks for reduced-order modeling of a parametric partial differential equation
Tensorial neural networks (TNNs) combine the successes of multilinear algebra with those of deep learning to enable extremely efficient reduced-order models of high-dimensional problems. Here, I describe a deep neural network architecture that fuses multiple TNNs into a larger network, intended to solve a broader class of problems than a single TNN. I evaluate this architecture, referred to as a "stacked tensorial neural network" (STNN), on a parametric PDE with three independent variables and three parameters. The three parameters correspond to one PDE coefficient and two quantities describing the domain geometry. The STNN provides an accurate reduced-order description of the solution manifold over a wide range of parameters. There is also evidence of meaningful generalization to parameter values outside its training data. Finally, while the STNN architecture is relatively simple and problem agnostic, it can be regularized to incorporate problem-specific features like symmetries and physical modeling assumptions.
Explicit gate construction of block-encoding for Hamiltonians needed for simulating partial differential equations
Quantum computation is an emerging technology with important potential for solving certain problems pivotal in various scientific and engineering disciplines. This paper introduces an efficient quantum protocol for the explicit construction of the block-encoding for an important class of Hamiltonians. Using the Schrodingerisation technique -- which converts non-conservative PDEs into conservative ones -- this particular class of Hamiltonians is shown to be sufficient for simulating any linear partial differential equations that have coefficients which are polynomial functions. The class of Hamiltonians consist of discretisations of polynomial products and sums of position and momentum operators. This construction is explicit and leverages minimal one- and two-qubit operations. The explicit construction of this block-encoding forms a fundamental building block for constructing the unitary evolution operator for this Hamiltonian. The proposed algorithm exhibits polynomial scaling with respect to the spatial partitioning size, suggesting an exponential speedup over classical finite-difference methods. This work provides an important foundation for building explicit and efficient quantum circuits for solving partial differential equations.
PDEformer: Towards a Foundation Model for One-Dimensional Partial Differential Equations
This paper introduces PDEformer, a neural solver for partial differential equations (PDEs) capable of simultaneously addressing various types of PDEs. We advocate representing the PDE in the form of a computational graph, facilitating the seamless integration of both symbolic and numerical information inherent in a PDE. A graph Transformer and an implicit neural representation (INR) are employed to generate mesh-free predicted solutions. Following pretraining on data exhibiting a certain level of diversity, our model achieves zero-shot accuracies on benchmark datasets that surpass those of adequately trained expert models. Additionally, PDEformer demonstrates promising results in the inverse problem of PDE coefficient recovery.
Optimal piecewise linear data compression for solutions of parametrized partial differential equations
Model order reduction has been extensively studied over the last two decades. Projection-based methods such as the Proper Orthogonal Decomposition and the Reduced Basis Method enjoy the important advantages of Galerkin methods in the derivation of the reduced problem, but are limited to linear data compression for which the reduced solution is sought as a linear combination of spatial modes. Nonlinear data compression must be used when the solution manifold is not embedded in a low-dimensional subspace. Early methods involve piecewise linear data compression, by constructing a dictionary of reduced-order models tailored to a partition of the solution manifold. In this work, we introduce the concept of optimal partition of the solution manifold in terms of normalized Kolmogorov widths, and prove that the optimal partitions can be found by means of a representative-based clustering algorithm using the sine dissimilarity measure on the solution manifold.
Roughness Index for Loss Landscapes of Neural Network Models of Partial Differential Equations
Loss landscape is a useful tool to characterize and compare neural network models. The main challenge for analysis of loss landscape for the deep neural networks is that they are generally highly non-convex in very high dimensional space. In this paper, we develop "the roughness"concept for understanding such landscapes in high dimensions and apply this technique to study two neural network models arising from solving differential equations. Our main innovation is the proposal of a well-defined and easy-to-compute roughness index (RI) which is based on the mean and variance of the (normalized) total variation for one-dimensional functions projected on randomly sampled directions. A large RI at the local minimizer hints an oscillatory landscape profile and indicates a severe challenge for the first-order optimization method. Particularly, we observe the increasing-then-decreasing pattern for RI along the gradient descent path in most models. We apply our method to two types of loss functions used to solve partial differential equations (PDEs) when the solution of PDE is parametrized by neural networks. Our empirical results on these PDE problems reveal important and consistent observations that the landscapes from the deep Galerkin method around its local minimizers are less rough than the deep Ritz method.
Physics Informed Deep Learning (Part I): Data-driven Solutions of Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations
We introduce physics informed neural networks -- neural networks that are trained to solve supervised learning tasks while respecting any given law of physics described by general nonlinear partial differential equations. In this two part treatise, we present our developments in the context of solving two main classes of problems: data-driven solution and data-driven discovery of partial differential equations. Depending on the nature and arrangement of the available data, we devise two distinct classes of algorithms, namely continuous time and discrete time models. The resulting neural networks form a new class of data-efficient universal function approximators that naturally encode any underlying physical laws as prior information. In this first part, we demonstrate how these networks can be used to infer solutions to partial differential equations, and obtain physics-informed surrogate models that are fully differentiable with respect to all input coordinates and free parameters.
Multi-Fidelity Physics-Informed Neural Networks with Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification and Adaptive Residual Learning for Efficient Solution of Parametric Partial Differential Equations
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) by embedding physical laws directly into neural network training. However, solving high-fidelity PDEs remains computationally prohibitive, particularly for parametric systems requiring multiple evaluations across varying parameter configurations. This paper presents MF-BPINN, a novel multi-fidelity framework that synergistically combines physics-informed neural networks with Bayesian uncertainty quantification and adaptive residual learning. Our approach leverages abundant low-fidelity simulations alongside sparse high-fidelity data through a hierarchical neural architecture that learns nonlinear correlations across fidelity levels. We introduce an adaptive residual network with learnable gating mechanisms that dynamically balances linear and nonlinear fidelity discrepancies. Furthermore, we develop a rigorous Bayesian framework employing Hamiltonian Monte Carlo.
DeepONet: Learning nonlinear operators for identifying differential equations based on the universal approximation theorem of operators
While it is widely known that neural networks are universal approximators of continuous functions, a less known and perhaps more powerful result is that a neural network with a single hidden layer can approximate accurately any nonlinear continuous operator. This universal approximation theorem is suggestive of the potential application of neural networks in learning nonlinear operators from data. However, the theorem guarantees only a small approximation error for a sufficient large network, and does not consider the important optimization and generalization errors. To realize this theorem in practice, we propose deep operator networks (DeepONets) to learn operators accurately and efficiently from a relatively small dataset. A DeepONet consists of two sub-networks, one for encoding the input function at a fixed number of sensors x_i, i=1,dots,m (branch net), and another for encoding the locations for the output functions (trunk net). We perform systematic simulations for identifying two types of operators, i.e., dynamic systems and partial differential equations, and demonstrate that DeepONet significantly reduces the generalization error compared to the fully-connected networks. We also derive theoretically the dependence of the approximation error in terms of the number of sensors (where the input function is defined) as well as the input function type, and we verify the theorem with computational results. More importantly, we observe high-order error convergence in our computational tests, namely polynomial rates (from half order to fourth order) and even exponential convergence with respect to the training dataset size.
Neural Network Learning of Black-Scholes Equation for Option Pricing
One of the most discussed problems in the financial world is stock option pricing. The Black-Scholes Equation is a Parabolic Partial Differential Equation which provides an option pricing model. The present work proposes an approach based on Neural Networks to solve the Black-Scholes Equations. Real-world data from the stock options market were used as the initial boundary to solve the Black-Scholes Equation. In particular, times series of call options prices of Brazilian companies Petrobras and Vale were employed. The results indicate that the network can learn to solve the Black-Sholes Equation for a specific real-world stock options time series. The experimental results showed that the Neural network option pricing based on the Black-Sholes Equation solution can reach an option pricing forecasting more accurate than the traditional Black-Sholes analytical solutions. The experimental results making it possible to use this methodology to make short-term call option price forecasts in options markets.
DiffusionPDE: Generative PDE-Solving Under Partial Observation
We introduce a general framework for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) using generative diffusion models. In particular, we focus on the scenarios where we do not have the full knowledge of the scene necessary to apply classical solvers. Most existing forward or inverse PDE approaches perform poorly when the observations on the data or the underlying coefficients are incomplete, which is a common assumption for real-world measurements. In this work, we propose DiffusionPDE that can simultaneously fill in the missing information and solve a PDE by modeling the joint distribution of the solution and coefficient spaces. We show that the learned generative priors lead to a versatile framework for accurately solving a wide range of PDEs under partial observation, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art methods for both forward and inverse directions.
Complex Valued Deep Operator Network (DeepONet) $[\mathcal{G}]$ for Three Dimensional Maxwell's Equations: $\mathcal{G} \in \mathbb{C}^{m \times n}$
Maxwell's equations, a system of linear partial differential equations (PDEs), describe the behavior of electric and magnetic fields in time and space and are essential for many important electromagnetic applications. Although numerical methods have been applied successfully in the past, the primary challenge in solving these equations arises from the frequency of electromagnetic fields, which depends on the shape and size of the objects to be resolved. Since the domain of influence for these equations is compactly supported, even a small perturbation in frequency necessitates a new discretization of Maxwell's equations, resulting in substantial computational costs. In this work, we investigate the potential of neural operators, particularly the Deep Operator Network (DeepONet) and its variants, as a surrogate model for Maxwell's equations. Existing DeepONet implementations are restricted to real-valued data in R^n, but since the time-harmonic Maxwell's equations yield solutions in the complex domain C^n, a specialized architecture is required to handle complex algebra. We propose a formulation of DeepONet for complex data, define the forward pass in the complex domain, and adopt a reparametrized version of DeepONet for more efficient training. We also propose a unified framework to combine a plurality of DeepONets, trained for multiple electromagnetic field components, to incorporate the boundary condition. We conduct computational experiments on a 3D metallic sphere without singularities and on a metallic almond-shaped target to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for problems involving singularity-prone solutions. As shown by computational experiments, our method significantly enhances the efficiency of predicting scattered fields from a spherical object at arbitrary high frequencies.
Solving Navier-Stokes Equations Using Data-free Physics-Informed Neural Networks With Hard Boundary Conditions
In recent years, Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have emerged as a powerful and robust framework for solving nonlinear differential equations across a wide range of scientific and engineering disciplines, including biology, geophysics, astrophysics and fluid dynamics. In the PINN framework, the governing partial differential equations, along with initial and boundary conditions, are encoded directly into the loss function, enabling the network to learn solutions that are consistent with the underlying physics. In this work, we employ the PINN framework to solve the dimensionless Navier-Stokes equations for three two-dimensional incompressible, steady, laminar flow problems without using any labeled data. The boundary and initial conditions are enforced in a hard manner, ensuring they are satisfied exactly rather than penalized during training. We validate the PINN predicted velocity profiles, drag coefficients and pressure profiles against the conventional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations for moderate to high values of Reynolds number (Re). It is observed that the PINN predictions show good agreement with the CFD results at lower Re. We also extend our analysis to a transient condition and find that our method is equally capable of simulating complex time-dependent flow dynamics. To quantitatively assess the accuracy, we compute the L_2 normalized error, which lies in the range O(10^{-4}) - O(10^{-1}) for our chosen case studies.
Frequency Bias and OOD Generalization in Neural Operators under a Variable-Coefficient Wave Equation
Neural operators learn to map initial conditions to the terminal solution of partial differential equations (PDEs), providing a surrogate for the full operator mapping. This enables rapid prediction across different input configurations. While recent neural operator architectures have demonstrated strong performance on diverse PDE tasks, their behavior under structured distribution shifts remains insufficiently understood. To investigate this, we study operator learning in a wave propagation setting governed by a one-dimensional variable-coefficient wave equation, using two representative architectures, the Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) and the Deep Operator Network (DeepONet). To examine their generalization under distribution shifts, we consider structured out-of-distribution (OOD) settings that independently vary input frequency and coefficient smoothness. The results show that under smoothness shifts, both models maintain stable performance, with FNO achieving lower error. In contrast, under frequency shifts, FNO exhibits a sharp increase in error under unseen high-frequency inputs, whereas DeepONet shows milder degradation despite higher overall error. Our analysis reveals that these differences arise from how each architecture represents and responds to variations in frequency structure. Together, these findings highlight a fundamental gap between strong in-distribution performance and generalization under distribution shifts in operator learning, underscoring the role of architectural representation bias in developing more reliable neural operators for physics-based PDE simulations beyond the training distribution.
Solving the fully nonlinear Monge-Ampère equation using the Legendre-Kolmogorov-Arnold Network method
In this paper, we propose a novel neural network framework, the Legendre-Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (Legendre-KAN) method, designed to solve fully nonlinear Monge-Ampère equations with Dirichlet boundary conditions. The architecture leverages the orthogonality of Legendre polynomials as basis functions, significantly enhancing both convergence speed and solution accuracy compared to traditional methods. Furthermore, the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem provides a strong theoretical foundation for the interpretability and optimization of the network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through numerical examples, involving both smooth and singular solutions in various dimensions. This work not only addresses the challenges of solving high-dimensional and singular Monge-Ampère equations but also highlights the potential of neural network-based approaches for complex partial differential equations. Additionally, the method is applied to the optimal transport problem in image mapping, showcasing its practical utility in geometric image transformation. This approach is expected to pave the way for further enhancement of KAN-based applications and numerical solutions of PDEs across a wide range of scientific and engineering fields.
Accurate Differential Operators for Hybrid Neural Fields
Neural fields have become widely used in various fields, from shape representation to neural rendering, and for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). With the advent of hybrid neural field representations like Instant NGP that leverage small MLPs and explicit representations, these models train quickly and can fit large scenes. Yet in many applications like rendering and simulation, hybrid neural fields can cause noticeable and unreasonable artifacts. This is because they do not yield accurate spatial derivatives needed for these downstream applications. In this work, we propose two ways to circumvent these challenges. Our first approach is a post hoc operator that uses local polynomial fitting to obtain more accurate derivatives from pre-trained hybrid neural fields. Additionally, we also propose a self-supervised fine-tuning approach that refines the hybrid neural field to yield accurate derivatives directly while preserving the initial signal. We show applications of our method to rendering, collision simulation, and solving PDEs. We observe that using our approach yields more accurate derivatives, reducing artifacts and leading to more accurate simulations in downstream applications.
Physics-Informed Neural Network for the Transient Diffusivity Equation in Reservoir Engineering
Physics-Informed machine learning models have recently emerged with some interesting and unique features that can be applied to reservoir engineering. In particular, physics-informed neural networks (PINN) leverage the fact that neural networks are a type of universal function approximators that can embed the knowledge of any physical laws that govern a given data-set in the learning process, and can be described by partial differential equations. The transient diffusivity equation is a fundamental equation in reservoir engineering and the general solution to this equation forms the basis for Pressure Transient Analysis (PTA). The diffusivity equation is derived by combining three physical principles, the continuity equation, Darcy's equation, and the equation of state for a slightly compressible liquid. Obtaining general solutions to this equation is imperative to understand flow regimes in porous media. Analytical solutions of the transient diffusivity equation are usually hard to obtain due to the stiff nature of the equation caused by the steep gradients of the pressure near the well. In this work we apply physics-informed neural networks to the one and two dimensional diffusivity equation and demonstrate that decomposing the space domain into very few subdomains can overcome the stiffness problem of the equation. Additionally, we demonstrate that the inverse capabilities of PINNs can estimate missing physics such as permeability and distance from sealing boundary similar to buildup tests without shutting in the well.
CodePDE: An Inference Framework for LLM-driven PDE Solver Generation
Partial differential equations (PDEs) are fundamental to modeling physical systems, yet solving them remains a complex challenge. Traditional numerical solvers rely on expert knowledge to implement and are computationally expensive, while neural-network-based solvers require large training datasets and often lack interpretability. In this work, we frame PDE solving as a code generation task and introduce CodePDE, the first inference framework for generating PDE solvers using large language models (LLMs). Leveraging advanced inference-time algorithms and scaling strategies, CodePDE unlocks critical capacities of LLM for PDE solving: reasoning, debugging, selfrefinement, and test-time scaling -- all without task-specific tuning. CodePDE achieves superhuman performance across a range of representative PDE problems. We also present a systematic empirical analysis of LLM generated solvers, analyzing their accuracy, efficiency, and numerical scheme choices. Our findings highlight the promise and the current limitations of LLMs in PDE solving, offering a new perspective on solver design and opportunities for future model development. Our code is available at https://github.com/LithiumDA/CodePDE.
Mamba Neural Operator: Who Wins? Transformers vs. State-Space Models for PDEs
Partial differential equations (PDEs) are widely used to model complex physical systems, but solving them efficiently remains a significant challenge. Recently, Transformers have emerged as the preferred architecture for PDEs due to their ability to capture intricate dependencies. However, they struggle with representing continuous dynamics and long-range interactions. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Mamba Neural Operator (MNO), a novel framework that enhances neural operator-based techniques for solving PDEs. MNO establishes a formal theoretical connection between structured state-space models (SSMs) and neural operators, offering a unified structure that can adapt to diverse architectures, including Transformer-based models. By leveraging the structured design of SSMs, MNO captures long-range dependencies and continuous dynamics more effectively than traditional Transformers. Through extensive analysis, we show that MNO significantly boosts the expressive power and accuracy of neural operators, making it not just a complement but a superior framework for PDE-related tasks, bridging the gap between efficient representation and accurate solution approximation. Our code is available on https://github.com/Math-ML-X/Mamba-Neural-Operator
Learning-guided Kansa collocation for forward and inverse PDEs beyond linearity
Partial Differential Equations are precise in modelling the physical, biological and graphical phenomena. However, the numerical methods suffer from the curse of dimensionality, high computation costs and domain-specific discretization. We aim to explore pros and cons of different PDE solvers, and apply them to specific scientific simulation problems, including forwarding solution, inverse problems and equations discovery. In particular, we extend the recent CNF (NeurIPS 2023) framework solver to multi-dependent-variable and non-linear settings, together with down-stream applications. The outcomes include implementation of selected methods, self-tuning techniques, evaluation on benchmark problems and a comprehensive survey of neural PDE solvers and scientific simulation applications.
TENG: Time-Evolving Natural Gradient for Solving PDEs With Deep Neural Nets Toward Machine Precision
Partial differential equations (PDEs) are instrumental for modeling dynamical systems in science and engineering. The advent of neural networks has initiated a significant shift in tackling these complexities though challenges in accuracy persist, especially for initial value problems. In this paper, we introduce the Time-Evolving Natural Gradient (TENG), generalizing time-dependent variational principles and optimization-based time integration, leveraging natural gradient optimization to obtain high accuracy in neural-network-based PDE solutions. Our comprehensive development includes algorithms like TENG-Euler and its high-order variants, such as TENG-Heun, tailored for enhanced precision and efficiency. TENG's effectiveness is further validated through its performance, surpassing current leading methods and achieving machine precision in step-by-step optimizations across a spectrum of PDEs, including the heat equation, Allen-Cahn equation, and Burgers' equation.
Harnessing Scale and Physics: A Multi-Graph Neural Operator Framework for PDEs on Arbitrary Geometries
Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) underpin many scientific phenomena, yet traditional computational approaches often struggle with complex, nonlinear systems and irregular geometries. This paper introduces the AMG method, a Multi-Graph neural operator approach designed for efficiently solving PDEs on Arbitrary geometries. AMG leverages advanced graph-based techniques and dynamic attention mechanisms within a novel GraphFormer architecture, enabling precise management of diverse spatial domains and complex data interdependencies. By constructing multi-scale graphs to handle variable feature frequencies and a physics graph to encapsulate inherent physical properties, AMG significantly outperforms previous methods, which are typically limited to uniform grids. We present a comprehensive evaluation of AMG across six benchmarks, demonstrating its consistent superiority over existing state-of-the-art models. Our findings highlight the transformative potential of tailored graph neural operators in surmounting the challenges faced by conventional PDE solvers. Our code and datasets are available on https://github.com/lizhihao2022/AMG.
LE-PDE++: Mamba for accelerating PDEs Simulations
Partial Differential Equations are foundational in modeling science and natural systems such as fluid dynamics and weather forecasting. The Latent Evolution of PDEs method is designed to address the computational intensity of classical and deep learning-based PDE solvers by proposing a scalable and efficient alternative. To enhance the efficiency and accuracy of LE-PDE, we incorporate the Mamba model, an advanced machine learning model known for its predictive efficiency and robustness in handling complex dynamic systems with a progressive learning strategy. The LE-PDE was tested on several benchmark problems. The method demonstrated a marked reduction in computational time compared to traditional solvers and standalone deep learning models while maintaining high accuracy in predicting system behavior over time. Our method doubles the inference speed compared to the LE-PDE while retaining the same level of parameter efficiency, making it well-suited for scenarios requiring long-term predictions.
Evaluating Uncertainty Quantification approaches for Neural PDEs in scientific applications
The accessibility of spatially distributed data, enabled by affordable sensors, field, and numerical experiments, has facilitated the development of data-driven solutions for scientific problems, including climate change, weather prediction, and urban planning. Neural Partial Differential Equations (Neural PDEs), which combine deep learning (DL) techniques with domain expertise (e.g., governing equations) for parameterization, have proven to be effective in capturing valuable correlations within spatiotemporal datasets. However, sparse and noisy measurements coupled with modeling approximation introduce aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties. Therefore, quantifying uncertainties propagated from model inputs to outputs remains a challenge and an essential goal for establishing the trustworthiness of Neural PDEs. This work evaluates various Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) approaches for both Forward and Inverse Problems in scientific applications. Specifically, we investigate the effectiveness of Bayesian methods, such as Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) and Monte-Carlo Dropout (MCD), and a more conventional approach, Deep Ensembles (DE). To illustrate their performance, we take two canonical PDEs: Burger's equation and the Navier-Stokes equation. Our results indicate that Neural PDEs can effectively reconstruct flow systems and predict the associated unknown parameters. However, it is noteworthy that the results derived from Bayesian methods, based on our observations, tend to display a higher degree of certainty in their predictions as compared to those obtained using the DE. This elevated certainty in predictions suggests that Bayesian techniques might underestimate the true underlying uncertainty, thereby appearing more confident in their predictions than the DE approach.
GNOT: A General Neural Operator Transformer for Operator Learning
Learning partial differential equations' (PDEs) solution operators is an essential problem in machine learning. However, there are several challenges for learning operators in practical applications like the irregular mesh, multiple input functions, and complexity of the PDEs' solution. To address these challenges, we propose a general neural operator transformer (GNOT), a scalable and effective transformer-based framework for learning operators. By designing a novel heterogeneous normalized attention layer, our model is highly flexible to handle multiple input functions and irregular meshes. Besides, we introduce a geometric gating mechanism which could be viewed as a soft domain decomposition to solve the multi-scale problems. The large model capacity of the transformer architecture grants our model the possibility to scale to large datasets and practical problems. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple challenging datasets from different domains and achieve a remarkable improvement compared with alternative methods. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/thu-ml/GNOT.
MetaColloc: Optimization-Free PDE Solving via Meta-Learned Basis Functions
Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) with machine learning typically requires training a new neural network for every new equation. This optimization is slow. We introduce MetaColloc. It is an optimization-free and data-free framework that removes this bottleneck completely. We decouple basis discovery from the solving process. We meta-train a dual-branch neural network on diverse Gaussian Random Fields. This offline process creates a universal dictionary of neural basis functions. At test time, we freeze the network. We solve the PDE by assembling a collocation matrix. We find the solution through a single linear least squares step. For non-linear PDEs, we apply the Newton-Raphson method to achieve fast quadratic convergence. Our experiments across six 2D and 3D PDEs show massive improvements. MetaColloc reaches state-of-the-art accuracy on smooth and non-linear problems. It also reduces test-time computation by several orders of magnitude. Finally, we provide a detailed frequency sweep analysis. This analysis reveals a critical mismatch between function approximation and operator stability at extremely high frequencies. This profound finding opens a clear path toward future operator-aware meta-learning.
Learning to Solve PDEs on Neural Shape Representations
Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) on shapes underpins many shape analysis and engineering tasks; yet, prevailing PDE solvers operate on polygonal/triangle meshes while modern 3D assets increasingly live as neural representations. This mismatch leaves no suitable method to solve surface PDEs directly within the neural domain, forcing explicit mesh extraction or per-instance residual training, preventing end-to-end workflows. We present a novel, mesh-free formulation that learns a local update operator conditioned on neural (local) shape attributes, enabling surface PDEs to be solved directly where the (neural) data lives. The operator integrates naturally with prevalent neural surface representations, is trained once on a single representative shape, and generalizes across shape and topology variations, enabling accurate, fast inference without explicit meshing or per-instance optimization while preserving differentiability. Across analytic benchmarks (heat equation and Poisson solve on sphere) and real neural assets across different representations, our method slightly outperforms CPM while remaining reasonably close to FEM, and, to our knowledge, delivers the first end-to-end pipeline that solves surface PDEs on both neural and classical surface representations. Code will be released on acceptance.
PDE-Agent: A toolchain-augmented multi-agent framework for PDE solving
Solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) is a cornerstone of engineering and scientific research. Traditional methods for PDE solving are cumbersome, relying on manual setup and domain expertise. While Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINNs) introduced end-to-end neural network-based solutions, and frameworks like DeepXDE further enhanced automation, these approaches still depend on expert knowledge and lack full autonomy. In this work, we frame PDE solving as tool invocation via LLM-driven agents and introduce PDE-Agent, the first toolchain-augmented multi-agent collaboration framework, inheriting the reasoning capacity of LLMs and the controllability of external tools and enabling automated PDE solving from natural language descriptions. PDE-Agent leverages the strengths of multi-agent and multi-tool collaboration through two key innovations: (1) A Prog-Act framework with graph memory for multi-agent collaboration, which enables effective dynamic planning and error correction via dual-loop mechanisms (localized fixes and global revisions). (2) A Resource-Pool integrated with a tool-parameter separation mechanism for multi-tool collaboration. This centralizes the management of runtime artifacts and resolves inter-tool dependency gaps in existing frameworks. To validate and evaluate this new paradigm for PDE solving , we develop PDE-Bench, a multi-type PDE Benchmark for agent-based tool collaborative solving, and propose multi-level metrics for assessing tool coordination. Evaluations verify that PDE-Agent exhibits superior applicability and performance in complex multi-step, cross-step dependent tasks. This new paradigm of toolchain-augmented multi-agent PDE solving will further advance future developments in automated scientific computing. Our source code and dataset will be made publicly available.
(U)NFV: Supervised and Unsupervised Neural Finite Volume Methods for Solving Hyperbolic PDEs
We introduce (U)NFV, a modular neural network architecture that generalizes classical finite volume (FV) methods for solving hyperbolic conservation laws. Hyperbolic partial differential equations (PDEs) are challenging to solve, particularly conservation laws whose physically relevant solutions contain shocks and discontinuities. FV methods are widely used for their mathematical properties: convergence to entropy solutions, flow conservation, or total variation diminishing, but often lack accuracy and flexibility in complex settings. Neural Finite Volume addresses these limitations by learning update rules over extended spatial and temporal stencils while preserving conservation structure. It supports both supervised training on solution data (NFV) and unsupervised training via weak-form residual loss (UNFV). Applied to first-order conservation laws, (U)NFV achieves up to 10x lower error than Godunov's method, outperforms ENO/WENO, and rivals discontinuous Galerkin solvers with far less complexity. On traffic modeling problems, both from PDEs and from experimental highway data, (U)NFV captures nonlinear wave dynamics with significantly higher fidelity and scalability than traditional FV approaches.
Multiphysics Bench: Benchmarking and Investigating Scientific Machine Learning for Multiphysics PDEs
Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) with machine learning has recently attracted great attention, as PDEs are fundamental tools for modeling real-world systems that range from fundamental physical science to advanced engineering disciplines. Most real-world physical systems across various disciplines are actually involved in multiple coupled physical fields rather than a single field. However, previous machine learning studies mainly focused on solving single-field problems, but overlooked the importance and characteristics of multiphysics problems in real world. Multiphysics PDEs typically entail multiple strongly coupled variables, thereby introducing additional complexity and challenges, such as inter-field coupling. Both benchmarking and solving multiphysics problems with machine learning remain largely unexamined. To identify and address the emerging challenges in multiphysics problems, we mainly made three contributions in this work. First, we collect the first general multiphysics dataset, the Multiphysics Bench, that focuses on multiphysics PDE solving with machine learning. Multiphysics Bench is also the most comprehensive PDE dataset to date, featuring the broadest range of coupling types, the greatest diversity of PDE formulations, and the largest dataset scale. Second, we conduct the first systematic investigation on multiple representative learning-based PDE solvers, such as PINNs, FNO, DeepONet, and DiffusionPDE solvers, on multiphysics problems. Unfortunately, naively applying these existing solvers usually show very poor performance for solving multiphysics. Third, through extensive experiments and discussions, we report multiple insights and a bag of useful tricks for solving multiphysics with machine learning, motivating future directions in the study and simulation of complex, coupled physical systems.
PhyMPGN: Physics-encoded Message Passing Graph Network for spatiotemporal PDE systems
Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) serves as a cornerstone for modeling complex dynamical systems. Recent progresses have demonstrated grand benefits of data-driven neural-based models for predicting spatiotemporal dynamics (e.g., tremendous speedup gain compared with classical numerical methods). However, most existing neural models rely on rich training data, have limited extrapolation and generalization abilities, and suffer to produce precise or reliable physical prediction under intricate conditions (e.g., irregular mesh or geometry, complex boundary conditions, diverse PDE parameters, etc.). To this end, we propose a new graph learning approach, namely, Physics-encoded Message Passing Graph Network (PhyMPGN), to model spatiotemporal PDE systems on irregular meshes given small training datasets. Specifically, we incorporate a GNN into a numerical integrator to approximate the temporal marching of spatiotemporal dynamics for a given PDE system. Considering that many physical phenomena are governed by diffusion processes, we further design a learnable Laplace block, which encodes the discrete Laplace-Beltrami operator, to aid and guide the GNN learning in a physically feasible solution space. A boundary condition padding strategy is also designed to improve the model convergence and accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PhyMPGN is capable of accurately predicting various types of spatiotemporal dynamics on coarse unstructured meshes, consistently achieves the state-of-the-art results, and outperforms other baselines with considerable gains.
BENO: Boundary-embedded Neural Operators for Elliptic PDEs
Elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) are a major class of time-independent PDEs that play a key role in many scientific and engineering domains such as fluid dynamics, plasma physics, and solid mechanics. Recently, neural operators have emerged as a promising technique to solve elliptic PDEs more efficiently by directly mapping the input to solutions. However, existing networks typically cannot handle complex geometries and inhomogeneous boundary values present in the real world. Here we introduce Boundary-Embedded Neural Operators (BENO), a novel neural operator architecture that embeds the complex geometries and inhomogeneous boundary values into the solving of elliptic PDEs. Inspired by classical Green's function, BENO consists of two branches of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for interior source term and boundary values, respectively. Furthermore, a Transformer encoder maps the global boundary geometry into a latent vector which influences each message passing layer of the GNNs. We test our model extensively in elliptic PDEs with various boundary conditions. We show that all existing baseline methods fail to learn the solution operator. In contrast, our model, endowed with boundary-embedded architecture, outperforms state-of-the-art neural operators and strong baselines by an average of 60.96\%. Our source code can be found https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/beno.git.
Adversarial Adaptive Sampling: Unify PINN and Optimal Transport for the Approximation of PDEs
Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) is a central task in scientific computing. Recently, neural network approximation of PDEs has received increasing attention due to its flexible meshless discretization and its potential for high-dimensional problems. One fundamental numerical difficulty is that random samples in the training set introduce statistical errors into the discretization of loss functional which may become the dominant error in the final approximation, and therefore overshadow the modeling capability of the neural network. In this work, we propose a new minmax formulation to optimize simultaneously the approximate solution, given by a neural network model, and the random samples in the training set, provided by a deep generative model. The key idea is to use a deep generative model to adjust random samples in the training set such that the residual induced by the approximate PDE solution can maintain a smooth profile when it is being minimized. Such an idea is achieved by implicitly embedding the Wasserstein distance between the residual-induced distribution and the uniform distribution into the loss, which is then minimized together with the residual. A nearly uniform residual profile means that its variance is small for any normalized weight function such that the Monte Carlo approximation error of the loss functional is reduced significantly for a certain sample size. The adversarial adaptive sampling (AAS) approach proposed in this work is the first attempt to formulate two essential components, minimizing the residual and seeking the optimal training set, into one minmax objective functional for the neural network approximation of PDEs.
PIG: Physics-Informed Gaussians as Adaptive Parametric Mesh Representations
The approximation of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) using neural networks has seen significant advancements through Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs). Despite their straightforward optimization framework and flexibility in implementing various PDEs, PINNs often suffer from limited accuracy due to the spectral bias of Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs), which struggle to effectively learn high-frequency and non-linear components. Recently, parametric mesh representations in combination with neural networks have been investigated as a promising approach to eliminate the inductive biases of neural networks. However, they usually require very high-resolution grids and a large number of collocation points to achieve high accuracy while avoiding overfitting issues. In addition, the fixed positions of the mesh parameters restrict their flexibility, making it challenging to accurately approximate complex PDEs. To overcome these limitations, we propose Physics-Informed Gaussians (PIGs), which combine feature embeddings using Gaussian functions with a lightweight neural network. Our approach uses trainable parameters for the mean and variance of each Gaussian, allowing for dynamic adjustment of their positions and shapes during training. This adaptability enables our model to optimally approximate PDE solutions, unlike models with fixed parameter positions. Furthermore, the proposed approach maintains the same optimization framework used in PINNs, allowing us to benefit from their excellent properties. Experimental results show the competitive performance of our model across various PDEs, demonstrating its potential as a robust tool for solving complex PDEs. Our project page is available at https://namgyukang.github.io/Physics-Informed-Gaussians/
PDE-Refiner: Achieving Accurate Long Rollouts with Neural PDE Solvers
Time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) are ubiquitous in science and engineering. Recently, mostly due to the high computational cost of traditional solution techniques, deep neural network based surrogates have gained increased interest. The practical utility of such neural PDE solvers relies on their ability to provide accurate, stable predictions over long time horizons, which is a notoriously hard problem. In this work, we present a large-scale analysis of common temporal rollout strategies, identifying the neglect of non-dominant spatial frequency information, often associated with high frequencies in PDE solutions, as the primary pitfall limiting stable, accurate rollout performance. Based on these insights, we draw inspiration from recent advances in diffusion models to introduce PDE-Refiner; a novel model class that enables more accurate modeling of all frequency components via a multistep refinement process. We validate PDE-Refiner on challenging benchmarks of complex fluid dynamics, demonstrating stable and accurate rollouts that consistently outperform state-of-the-art models, including neural, numerical, and hybrid neural-numerical architectures. We further demonstrate that PDE-Refiner greatly enhances data efficiency, since the denoising objective implicitly induces a novel form of spectral data augmentation. Finally, PDE-Refiner's connection to diffusion models enables an accurate and efficient assessment of the model's predictive uncertainty, allowing us to estimate when the surrogate becomes inaccurate.
FluidWorld: Reaction-Diffusion Dynamics as a Predictive Substrate for World Models
World models learn to predict future states of an environment, enabling planning and mental simulation. Current approaches default to Transformer-based predictors operating in learned latent spaces. This comes at a cost: O(N^2) computation and no explicit spatial inductive bias. This paper asks a foundational question: is self-attention necessary for predictive world modeling, or can alternative computational substrates achieve comparable or superior results? I introduce FluidWorld, a proof-of-concept world model whose predictive dynamics are governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) of reaction-diffusion type. Instead of using a separate neural network predictor, the PDE integration itself produces the future state prediction. In a strictly parameter-matched three-way ablation on unconditional UCF-101 video prediction (64x64, ~800K parameters, identical encoder, decoder, losses, and data), FluidWorld is compared against both a Transformer baseline (self-attention) and a ConvLSTM baseline (convolutional recurrence). While all three models converge to comparable single-step prediction loss, FluidWorld achieves 2x lower reconstruction error, produces representations with 10-15% higher spatial structure preservation and 18-25% more effective dimensionality, and critically maintains coherent multi-step rollouts where both baselines degrade rapidly. All experiments were conducted on a single consumer-grade PC (Intel Core i5, NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti), without any large-scale compute. These results establish that PDE-based dynamics, which natively provide O(N) spatial complexity, adaptive computation, and global spatial coherence through diffusion, are a viable and parameter-efficient alternative to both attention and convolutional recurrence for world modeling.
Zebra: In-Context and Generative Pretraining for Solving Parametric PDEs
Solving time-dependent parametric partial differential equations (PDEs) is challenging, as models must adapt to variations in parameters such as coefficients, forcing terms, and boundary conditions. Data-driven neural solvers either train on data sampled from the PDE parameters distribution in the hope that the model generalizes to new instances or rely on gradient-based adaptation and meta-learning to implicitly encode the dynamics from observations. This often comes with increased inference complexity. Inspired by the in-context learning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), we introduce Zebra, a novel generative auto-regressive transformer designed to solve parametric PDEs without requiring gradient adaptation at inference. By leveraging in-context information during both pre-training and inference, Zebra dynamically adapts to new tasks by conditioning on input sequences that incorporate context trajectories or preceding states. This approach enables Zebra to flexibly handle arbitrarily sized context inputs and supports uncertainty quantification through the sampling of multiple solution trajectories. We evaluate Zebra across a variety of challenging PDE scenarios, demonstrating its adaptability, robustness, and superior performance compared to existing approaches.
Toward a Better Understanding of Fourier Neural Operators: Analysis and Improvement from a Spectral Perspective
In solving partial differential equations (PDEs), Fourier Neural Operators (FNOs) have exhibited notable effectiveness compared to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). This paper presents clear empirical evidence through spectral analysis to elucidate the superiority of FNO over CNNs: FNO is significantly more capable of learning low-frequencies. This empirical evidence also unveils FNO's distinct low-frequency bias, which limits FNO's effectiveness in learning high-frequency information from PDE data. To tackle this challenge, we introduce SpecBoost, an ensemble learning framework that employs multiple FNOs to better capture high-frequency information. Specifically, a secondary FNO is utilized to learn the overlooked high-frequency information from the prediction residual of the initial FNO. Experiments demonstrate that SpecBoost noticeably enhances FNO's prediction accuracy on diverse PDE applications, achieving an up to 71% improvement.
Neural Operator: Is data all you need to model the world? An insight into the impact of Physics Informed Machine Learning
Numerical approximations of partial differential equations (PDEs) are routinely employed to formulate the solution of physics, engineering and mathematical problems involving functions of several variables, such as the propagation of heat or sound, fluid flow, elasticity, electrostatics, electrodynamics, and more. While this has led to solving many complex phenomena, there are some limitations. Conventional approaches such as Finite Element Methods (FEMs) and Finite Differential Methods (FDMs) require considerable time and are computationally expensive. In contrast, data driven machine learning-based methods such as neural networks provide a faster, fairly accurate alternative, and have certain advantages such as discretization invariance and resolution invariance. This article aims to provide a comprehensive insight into how data-driven approaches can complement conventional techniques to solve engineering and physics problems, while also noting some of the major pitfalls of machine learning-based approaches. Furthermore, we highlight, a novel and fast machine learning-based approach (~1000x) to learning the solution operator of a PDE operator learning. We will note how these new computational approaches can bring immense advantages in tackling many problems in fundamental and applied physics.
PDEInvBench: A Comprehensive Dataset and Design Space Exploration of Neural Networks for PDE Inverse Problems
Inverse problems in partial differential equations (PDEs) involve estimating the physical parameters of a system from observed spatiotemporal solution fields.Neural networks are well-suited for PDE parameter estimation due to their capability to model function-to-function space transformations. While existing benchmarks of machine learning methods for PDEs primarily focus on the forward problem, there are no similar comprehensive studies and benchmark datasets on PDE inverse problems, i.e., mapping solution fields to underlying physical parameters. We fill this gap by introducing PDEInvBench, a comprehensive benchmark dataset consisting of numerical simulations for both time-dependent and time-independent PDEs across a wide range of physical behaviors and parameters. Our dataset includes evaluation splits that assess performance in both in-distribution and various out-of-distribution settings. Using our benchmark dataset, we comprehensively explore the design space of neural networks for PDE inverse problems along three key dimensions: (1) optimization procedures, analyzing the role of supervised, self-supervised, and test-time training objectives on performance, (2) problem representations, where we study the value of architectural choices with different inductive biases and various conditioning strategies, and (3) scaling, which we perform with respect to both model and data size. Our experiments reveal several practical insights: 1) neural networks perform best with a two-stage training procedure: initial supervision with PDE parameters followed by test-time fine-tuning using the PDE residual, 2) incorporating PDE derivatives as input features consistently improves accuracy, and 3) increasing the diversity of initial conditions in the training data yields greater performance gains than expanding the range of PDE parameters. We make our dataset and codebase publicly available.
DGNO: A Novel Physics-aware Neural Operator for Solving Forward and Inverse PDE Problems based on Deep, Generative Probabilistic Modeling
Solving parametric partial differential equations (PDEs) and associated PDE-based, inverse problems is a central task in engineering and physics, yet existing neural operator methods struggle with high-dimensional, discontinuous inputs and require large amounts of {\em labeled} training data. We propose the Deep Generative Neural Operator (DGNO), a physics-aware framework that addresses these challenges by leveraging a deep, generative, probabilistic model in combination with a set of lower-dimensional, latent variables that simultaneously encode PDE-inputs and PDE-outputs. This formulation can make use of unlabeled data and significantly improves inverse problem-solving, particularly for discontinuous or discrete-valued input functions. DGNO enforces physics constraints without labeled data by incorporating as virtual observables, weak-form residuals based on compactly supported radial basis functions (CSRBFs). These relax regularity constraints and eliminate higher-order derivatives from the objective function. We also introduce MultiONet, a novel neural operator architecture, which is a more expressive generalization of the popular DeepONet that significantly enhances the approximating power of the proposed model. These innovations make DGNO particularly effective for challenging forward and inverse, PDE-based problems, such as those involving multi-phase media. Numerical experiments demonstrate that DGNO achieves higher accuracy across multiple benchmarks while exhibiting robustness to noise and strong generalization to out-of-distribution cases. Its adaptability, and the ability to handle sparse, noisy data while providing probabilistic estimates, make DGNO a powerful tool for scientific and engineering applications.
Predicting Change, Not States: An Alternate Framework for Neural PDE Surrogates
Neural surrogates for partial differential equations (PDEs) have become popular due to their potential to quickly simulate physics. With a few exceptions, neural surrogates generally treat the forward evolution of time-dependent PDEs as a black box by directly predicting the next state. While this is a natural and easy framework for applying neural surrogates, it can be an over-simplified and rigid framework for predicting physics. In this work, we propose an alternative framework in which neural solvers predict the temporal derivative and an ODE integrator forwards the solution in time, which has little overhead and is broadly applicable across model architectures and PDEs. We find that by simply changing the training target and introducing numerical integration during inference, neural surrogates can gain accuracy and stability. Predicting temporal derivatives also allows models to not be constrained to a specific temporal discretization, allowing for flexible time-stepping during inference or training on higher-resolution PDE data. Lastly, we investigate why this new framework can be beneficial and in what situations does it work well.
Towards Universal Mesh Movement Networks
Solving complex Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) accurately and efficiently is an essential and challenging problem in all scientific and engineering disciplines. Mesh movement methods provide the capability to improve the accuracy of the numerical solution without increasing the overall mesh degree of freedom count. Conventional sophisticated mesh movement methods are extremely expensive and struggle to handle scenarios with complex boundary geometries. However, existing learning-based methods require re-training from scratch given a different PDE type or boundary geometry, which limits their applicability, and also often suffer from robustness issues in the form of inverted elements. In this paper, we introduce the Universal Mesh Movement Network (UM2N), which -- once trained -- can be applied in a non-intrusive, zero-shot manner to move meshes with different size distributions and structures, for solvers applicable to different PDE types and boundary geometries. UM2N consists of a Graph Transformer (GT) encoder for extracting features and a Graph Attention Network (GAT) based decoder for moving the mesh. We evaluate our method on advection and Navier-Stokes based examples, as well as a real-world tsunami simulation case. Our method outperforms existing learning-based mesh movement methods in terms of the benchmarks described above. In comparison to the conventional sophisticated Monge-Amp\`ere PDE-solver based method, our approach not only significantly accelerates mesh movement, but also proves effective in scenarios where the conventional method fails. Our project page is at https://erizmr.github.io/UM2N/.
Kolmogorov Arnold Informed neural network: A physics-informed deep learning framework for solving PDEs based on Kolmogorov Arnold Networks
AI for partial differential equations (PDEs) has garnered significant attention, particularly with the emergence of Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). The recent advent of Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) indicates that there is potential to revisit and enhance the previously MLP-based PINNs. Compared to MLPs, KANs offer interpretability and require fewer parameters. PDEs can be described in various forms, such as strong form, energy form, and inverse form. While mathematically equivalent, these forms are not computationally equivalent, making the exploration of different PDE formulations significant in computational physics. Thus, we propose different PDE forms based on KAN instead of MLP, termed Kolmogorov-Arnold-Informed Neural Network (KINN). We systematically compare MLP and KAN in various numerical examples of PDEs, including multi-scale, singularity, stress concentration, nonlinear hyperelasticity, heterogeneous, and complex geometry problems. Our results demonstrate that KINN significantly outperforms MLP in terms of accuracy and convergence speed for numerous PDEs in computational solid mechanics, except for the complex geometry problem. This highlights KINN's potential for more efficient and accurate PDE solutions in AI for PDEs.
Training Deep Surrogate Models with Large Scale Online Learning
The spatiotemporal resolution of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) plays important roles in the mathematical description of the world's physical phenomena. In general, scientists and engineers solve PDEs numerically by the use of computationally demanding solvers. Recently, deep learning algorithms have emerged as a viable alternative for obtaining fast solutions for PDEs. Models are usually trained on synthetic data generated by solvers, stored on disk and read back for training. This paper advocates that relying on a traditional static dataset to train these models does not allow the full benefit of the solver to be used as a data generator. It proposes an open source online training framework for deep surrogate models. The framework implements several levels of parallelism focused on simultaneously generating numerical simulations and training deep neural networks. This approach suppresses the I/O and storage bottleneck associated with disk-loaded datasets, and opens the way to training on significantly larger datasets. Experiments compare the offline and online training of four surrogate models, including state-of-the-art architectures. Results indicate that exposing deep surrogate models to more dataset diversity, up to hundreds of GB, can increase model generalization capabilities. Fully connected neural networks, Fourier Neural Operator (FNO), and Message Passing PDE Solver prediction accuracy is improved by 68%, 16% and 7%, respectively.
Learning Preconditioner for Conjugate Gradient PDE Solvers
Efficient numerical solvers for partial differential equations empower science and engineering. One of the commonly employed numerical solvers is the preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) algorithm which can solve large systems to a given precision level. One challenge in PCG solvers is the selection of preconditioners, as different problem-dependent systems can benefit from different preconditioners. We present a new method to introduce inductive bias in preconditioning conjugate gradient algorithm. Given a system matrix and a set of solution vectors arise from an underlying distribution, we train a graph neural network to obtain an approximate decomposition to the system matrix to be used as a preconditioner in the context of PCG solvers. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the efficacy and generalizability of our proposed approach in solving various 2D and 3D linear second-order PDEs.
Message Passing Neural PDE Solvers
The numerical solution of partial differential equations (PDEs) is difficult, having led to a century of research so far. Recently, there have been pushes to build neural--numerical hybrid solvers, which piggy-backs the modern trend towards fully end-to-end learned systems. Most works so far can only generalize over a subset of properties to which a generic solver would be faced, including: resolution, topology, geometry, boundary conditions, domain discretization regularity, dimensionality, etc. In this work, we build a solver, satisfying these properties, where all the components are based on neural message passing, replacing all heuristically designed components in the computation graph with backprop-optimized neural function approximators. We show that neural message passing solvers representationally contain some classical methods, such as finite differences, finite volumes, and WENO schemes. In order to encourage stability in training autoregressive models, we put forward a method that is based on the principle of zero-stability, posing stability as a domain adaptation problem. We validate our method on various fluid-like flow problems, demonstrating fast, stable, and accurate performance across different domain topologies, equation parameters, discretizations, etc., in 1D and 2D.
Pre-Generating Multi-Difficulty PDE Data for Few-Shot Neural PDE Solvers
A key aspect of learned partial differential equation (PDE) solvers is that the main cost often comes from generating training data with classical solvers rather than learning the model itself. Another is that there are clear axes of difficulty--e.g., more complex geometries and higher Reynolds numbers--along which problems become (1) harder for classical solvers and thus (2) more likely to benefit from neural speedups. Towards addressing this chicken-and-egg challenge, we study difficulty transfer on 2D incompressible Navier-Stokes, systematically varying task complexity along geometry (number and placement of obstacles), physics (Reynolds number), and their combination. Similar to how it is possible to spend compute to pre-train foundation models and improve their performance on downstream tasks, we find that by classically solving (analogously pre-generating) many low and medium difficulty examples and including them in the training set, it is possible to learn high-difficulty physics from far fewer samples. Furthermore, we show that by combining low and high difficulty data, we can spend 8.9x less compute on pre-generating a dataset to achieve the same error as using only high difficulty examples. Our results highlight that how we allocate classical-solver compute across difficulty levels is as important as how much we allocate overall, and suggest substantial gains from principled curation of pre-generated PDE data for neural solvers. Our code is available at https://github.com/Naman-Choudhary-AI-ML/pregenerating-pde
Learning Nonlinear Responses in PET Bottle Buckling with a Hybrid DeepONet-Transolver Framework
Neural surrogates and operator networks for solving partial differential equation (PDE) problems have attracted significant research interest in recent years. However, most existing approaches are limited in their ability to generalize solutions across varying non-parametric geometric domains. In this work, we address this challenge in the context of Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) bottle buckling analysis, a representative packaging design problem conventionally solved using computationally expensive finite element analysis (FEA). We introduce a hybrid DeepONet-Transolver framework that simultaneously predicts nodal displacement fields and the time evolution of reaction forces during top load compression. Our methodology is evaluated on two families of bottle geometries parameterized by two and four design variables. Training data is generated using nonlinear FEA simulations in Abaqus for 254 unique designs per family. The proposed framework achieves mean relative L^{2} errors of 2.5-13% for displacement fields and approximately 2.4% for time-dependent reaction forces for the four-parameter bottle family. Point-wise error analyses further show absolute displacement errors on the order of 10^{-4}-10^{-3}, with the largest discrepancies confined to localized geometric regions. Importantly, the model accurately captures key physical phenomena, such as buckling behavior, across diverse bottle geometries. These results highlight the potential of our framework as a scalable and computationally efficient surrogate, particularly for multi-task predictions in computational mechanics and applications requiring rapid design evaluation.
Multi-Grid Back-Projection Networks
Multi-Grid Back-Projection (MGBP) is a fully-convolutional network architecture that can learn to restore images and videos with upscaling artifacts. Using the same strategy of multi-grid partial differential equation (PDE) solvers this multiscale architecture scales computational complexity efficiently with increasing output resolutions. The basic processing block is inspired in the iterative back-projection (IBP) algorithm and constitutes a type of cross-scale residual block with feedback from low resolution references. The architecture performs in par with state-of-the-arts alternatives for regression targets that aim to recover an exact copy of a high resolution image or video from which only a downscale image is known. A perceptual quality target aims to create more realistic outputs by introducing artificial changes that can be different from a high resolution original content as long as they are consistent with the low resolution input. For this target we propose a strategy using noise inputs in different resolution scales to control the amount of artificial details generated in the output. The noise input controls the amount of innovation that the network uses to create artificial realistic details. The effectiveness of this strategy is shown in benchmarks and it is explained as a particular strategy to traverse the perception-distortion plane.
Well-Posedness of a Coupled Brinkman--Biofilm--Nutrient System with Volume-Fraction Constraints
We investigate a coupled system of partial differential equations modeling the interaction between Brinkman flow, biofilm evolution, and nutrient transport in a porous medium. The model captures the mutual influence between the fluid velocity and the biofilm through drag and diffusion coefficients that depend on the local biofilm volume fraction. A hard constraint on the admissible range of the biofilm fraction is incorporated through the subdifferential of an indicator functional, which leads naturally to an evolution variational inequality formulation for the biofilm dynamics. Assuming standard coercivity, ellipticity, and growth conditions on the model coefficients and reaction terms, we prove the global-in-time existence of weak solutions. The analysis relies on a decomposition of the system into three interconnected subproblems: the Brinkman equation with a fixed biofilm profile, the constrained biofilm evolution treated through maximal monotone operator theory, and the nutrient equation viewed as a semilinear parabolic problem. These components are then coupled through a Leray--Schauder type fixed-point argument, with the passage to the limit justified by Aubin--Lions and Simon compactness results. We further establish the nonnegativity of the nutrient concentration under a natural quasi-positivity assumption on the reaction term. Finally, we provide conditional uniqueness results for weak solutions in two spatial dimensions under additional smallness assumptions.
EquiNO: A Physics-Informed Neural Operator for Multiscale Simulations
Multiscale problems are ubiquitous in physics. Numerical simulations of such problems by solving partial differential equations (PDEs) at high resolution are computationally too expensive for many-query scenarios, e.g., uncertainty quantification, remeshing applications, topology optimization, and so forth. This limitation has motivated the application of data-driven surrogate models, where the microscale computations are substituted with a surrogate, usually acting as a black-box mapping between macroscale quantities. These models offer significant speedups but struggle with incorporating microscale physical constraints, such as the balance of linear momentum and constitutive models. In this contribution, we propose Equilibrium Neural Operator (EquiNO) as a complementary physics-informed PDE surrogate for predicting microscale physics and compare it with variational physics-informed neural and operator networks. Our framework, applicable to the so-called multiscale FE^{,2}, computations, introduces the FE-OL approach by integrating the finite element (FE) method with operator learning (OL). We apply the proposed FE-OL approach to quasi-static problems of solid mechanics. The results demonstrate that FE-OL can yield accurate solutions even when confronted with a restricted dataset during model development. Our results show that EquiNO achieves speedup factors exceeding 8000-fold compared to traditional methods and offers an optimal balance between data-driven and physics-based strategies.
Optimal Control of Medical Drug in a Nonlocal Model of Solid Tumor Growth
This paper presents a mathematical framework for optimizing drug delivery in cancer treatment using a nonlocal model of solid tumor growth. We present a coupled system of partial differential equations that incorporate long-range cellular interactions through integral terms and drug-induced cell death. The model accounts for spatial heterogeneity in both tumor cell density and drug concentration while capturing the complex dynamics of drug resistance development. We first establish the well-posedness of the coupled system by proving the existence and uniqueness of a solution under appropriate regularity conditions. The optimal control problem is then formulated to minimize tumor size while accounting for drug toxicity constraints. Using variational methods, we derive the necessary optimality conditions and characterize the optimal control through an adjoint system. Theoretical results can help to design effective chemotherapy schedules that balance treatment efficacy with adverse effects.
Uncertainty quantification for stationary and time-dependent PDEs subject to Gevrey regular random domain deformations
We study uncertainty quantification for partial differential equations subject to domain uncertainty. We parameterize the random domain using the model recently considered by Chernov and Le (2024) as well as Harbrecht, Schmidlin, and Schwab (2024) in which the input random field is assumed to belong to a Gevrey smoothness class. This approach has the advantage of being substantially more general than models which assume a particular parametric representation of the input random field such as a Karhunen-Loeve series expansion. We consider both the Poisson equation as well as the heat equation and design randomly shifted lattice quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) cubature rules for the computation of the expected solution under domain uncertainty. We show that these QMC rules exhibit dimension-independent, essentially linear cubature convergence rates in this framework. In addition, we complete the error analysis by taking into account the approximation errors incurred by dimension truncation of the random input field and finite element discretization. Numerical experiments are presented to confirm the theoretical rates.
Wavelet Diffusion Neural Operator
Simulating and controlling physical systems described by partial differential equations (PDEs) are crucial tasks across science and engineering. Recently, diffusion generative models have emerged as a competitive class of methods for these tasks due to their ability to capture long-term dependencies and model high-dimensional states. However, diffusion models typically struggle with handling system states with abrupt changes and generalizing to higher resolutions. In this work, we propose Wavelet Diffusion Neural Operator (WDNO), a novel PDE simulation and control framework that enhances the handling of these complexities. WDNO comprises two key innovations. Firstly, WDNO performs diffusion-based generative modeling in the wavelet domain for the entire trajectory to handle abrupt changes and long-term dependencies effectively. Secondly, to address the issue of poor generalization across different resolutions, which is one of the fundamental tasks in modeling physical systems, we introduce multi-resolution training. We validate WDNO on five physical systems, including 1D advection equation, three challenging physical systems with abrupt changes (1D Burgers' equation, 1D compressible Navier-Stokes equation and 2D incompressible fluid), and a real-world dataset ERA5, which demonstrates superior performance on both simulation and control tasks over state-of-the-art methods, with significant improvements in long-term and detail prediction accuracy. Remarkably, in the challenging context of the 2D high-dimensional and indirect control task aimed at reducing smoke leakage, WDNO reduces the leakage by 33.2% compared to the second-best baseline. The code can be found at https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/wdno.git.
Structure-Preserving Operator Learning
Learning complex dynamics driven by partial differential equations directly from data holds great promise for fast and accurate simulations of complex physical systems. In most cases, this problem can be formulated as an operator learning task, where one aims to learn the operator representing the physics of interest, which entails discretization of the continuous system. However, preserving key continuous properties at the discrete level, such as boundary conditions, and addressing physical systems with complex geometries is challenging for most existing approaches. We introduce a family of operator learning architectures, structure-preserving operator networks (SPONs), that allows to preserve key mathematical and physical properties of the continuous system by leveraging finite element (FE) discretizations of the input-output spaces. SPONs are encode-process-decode architectures that are end-to-end differentiable, where the encoder and decoder follows from the discretizations of the input-output spaces. SPONs can operate on complex geometries, enforce certain boundary conditions exactly, and offer theoretical guarantees. Our framework provides a flexible way of devising structure-preserving architectures tailored to specific applications, and offers an explicit trade-off between performance and efficiency, all thanks to the FE discretization of the input-output spaces. Additionally, we introduce a multigrid-inspired SPON architecture that yields improved performance at higher efficiency. Finally, we release a software to automate the design and training of SPON architectures.
Accelerating Data Generation for Neural Operators via Krylov Subspace Recycling
Learning neural operators for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) has attracted great attention due to its high inference efficiency. However, training such operators requires generating a substantial amount of labeled data, i.e., PDE problems together with their solutions. The data generation process is exceptionally time-consuming, as it involves solving numerous systems of linear equations to obtain numerical solutions to the PDEs. Many existing methods solve these systems independently without considering their inherent similarities, resulting in extremely redundant computations. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel method, namely Sorting Krylov Recycling (SKR), to boost the efficiency of solving these systems, thus significantly accelerating data generation for neural operators training. To the best of our knowledge, SKR is the first attempt to address the time-consuming nature of data generation for learning neural operators. The working horse of SKR is Krylov subspace recycling, a powerful technique for solving a series of interrelated systems by leveraging their inherent similarities. Specifically, SKR employs a sorting algorithm to arrange these systems in a sequence, where adjacent systems exhibit high similarities. Then it equips a solver with Krylov subspace recycling to solve the systems sequentially instead of independently, thus effectively enhancing the solving efficiency. Both theoretical analysis and extensive experiments demonstrate that SKR can significantly accelerate neural operator data generation, achieving a remarkable speedup of up to 13.9 times.
Operator Learning with Neural Fields: Tackling PDEs on General Geometries
Machine learning approaches for solving partial differential equations require learning mappings between function spaces. While convolutional or graph neural networks are constrained to discretized functions, neural operators present a promising milestone toward mapping functions directly. Despite impressive results they still face challenges with respect to the domain geometry and typically rely on some form of discretization. In order to alleviate such limitations, we present CORAL, a new method that leverages coordinate-based networks for solving PDEs on general geometries. CORAL is designed to remove constraints on the input mesh, making it applicable to any spatial sampling and geometry. Its ability extends to diverse problem domains, including PDE solving, spatio-temporal forecasting, and inverse problems like geometric design. CORAL demonstrates robust performance across multiple resolutions and performs well in both convex and non-convex domains, surpassing or performing on par with state-of-the-art models.
A Neural PDE Solver with Temporal Stencil Modeling
Numerical simulation of non-linear partial differential equations plays a crucial role in modeling physical science and engineering phenomena, such as weather, climate, and aerodynamics. Recent Machine Learning (ML) models trained on low-resolution spatio-temporal signals have shown new promises in capturing important dynamics in high-resolution signals, under the condition that the models can effectively recover the missing details. However, this study shows that significant information is often lost in the low-resolution down-sampled features. To address such issues, we propose a new approach, namely Temporal Stencil Modeling (TSM), which combines the strengths of advanced time-series sequence modeling (with the HiPPO features) and state-of-the-art neural PDE solvers (with learnable stencil modeling). TSM aims to recover the lost information from the PDE trajectories and can be regarded as a temporal generalization of classic finite volume methods such as WENO. Our experimental results show that TSM achieves the new state-of-the-art simulation accuracy for 2-D incompressible Navier-Stokes turbulent flows: it significantly outperforms the previously reported best results by 19.9% in terms of the highly-correlated duration time and reduces the inference latency into 80%. We also show a strong generalization ability of the proposed method to various out-of-distribution turbulent flow settings. Our code is available at "https://github.com/Edward-Sun/TSM-PDE".
General Covariance Data Augmentation for Neural PDE Solvers
The growing body of research shows how to replace classical partial differential equation (PDE) integrators with neural networks. The popular strategy is to generate the input-output pairs with a PDE solver, train the neural network in the regression setting, and use the trained model as a cheap surrogate for the solver. The bottleneck in this scheme is the number of expensive queries of a PDE solver needed to generate the dataset. To alleviate the problem, we propose a computationally cheap augmentation strategy based on general covariance and simple random coordinate transformations. Our approach relies on the fact that physical laws are independent of the coordinate choice, so the change in the coordinate system preserves the type of a parametric PDE and only changes PDE's data (e.g., initial conditions, diffusion coefficient). For tried neural networks and partial differential equations, proposed augmentation improves test error by 23% on average. The worst observed result is a 17% increase in test error for multilayer perceptron, and the best case is a 80% decrease for dilated residual network.
Optimal sources for elliptic PDEs
We investigate optimal control problems governed by the elliptic partial differential equation -Delta u=f subject to Dirichlet boundary conditions on a given domain Omega. The control variable in this setting is the right-hand side f, and the objective is to minimize a cost functional that depends simultaneously on the control f and on the associated state function u. We establish the existence of optimal controls and analyze their qualitative properties by deriving necessary conditions for optimality. In particular, when pointwise constraints of the form alphale flebeta are imposed a priori on the control, we examine situations where a {\it bang-bang} phenomenon arises, that is where the optimal control f assumes only the extremal values alpha and beta. More precisely, the control takes the form f=alpha1_E+beta1_{Omegasetminus E}, thereby placing the problem within the framework of shape optimization. Under suitable assumptions, we further establish certain regularity properties for the optimal sets E. Finally, in the last part of the paper, we present numerical simulations that illustrate our theoretical findings through a selection of representative examples.
Physics-Informed Diffusion Models
Generative models such as denoising diffusion models are quickly advancing their ability to approximate highly complex data distributions. They are also increasingly leveraged in scientific machine learning, where samples from the implied data distribution are expected to adhere to specific governing equations. We present a framework that unifies generative modeling and partial differential equation fulfillment by introducing a first-principle-based loss term that enforces generated samples to fulfill the underlying physical constraints. Our approach reduces the residual error by up to two orders of magnitude compared to previous work in a fluid flow case study and outperforms task-specific frameworks in relevant metrics for structural topology optimization. We also present numerical evidence that our extended training objective acts as a natural regularization mechanism against overfitting. Our framework is simple to implement and versatile in its applicability for imposing equality and inequality constraints as well as auxiliary optimization objectives.
Growth of cancer stem cell driven tumors: staged invasion, linear determinacy, and the tumor invasion paradox
We study growth of solid tumors in a partial differential equation model introduced by Hillen et al for the interaction between tumor cells (TCs) and cancer stem cells (CSCs). We find that invasion into the cancer-free state may be separated into two regimes, depending on the death rate of tumor cells. In the first, staged invasion regime, invasion into the cancer-free state is lead by tumor cells, which are then subsequently invaded at a slower speed by cancer stem cells. In the second, TC extinction regime, cancer stem cells directly invade the cancer-free state. Relying on recent results establishing front selection propagation under marginal stability assumptions, we use geometric singular perturbation theory to establish existence and selection properties of front solutions which describe both the primary and secondary invasion processes. With rigorous predictions for the invasion speeds, we are then able to heuristically predict how the total cancer mass as a function of time depends on the TC death rate, finding in some situations a tumor invasion paradox, in which increasing the TC death rate leads to an increase in the total cancer mass. Our methods give a general approach for verifying linear determinacy of spreading speeds of invasion fronts in systems with fast-slow structure.
Disentangled Multi-Fidelity Deep Bayesian Active Learning
To balance quality and cost, various domain areas of science and engineering run simulations at multiple levels of sophistication. Multi-fidelity active learning aims to learn a direct mapping from input parameters to simulation outputs at the highest fidelity by actively acquiring data from multiple fidelity levels. However, existing approaches based on Gaussian processes are hardly scalable to high-dimensional data. Deep learning-based methods often impose a hierarchical structure in hidden representations, which only supports passing information from low-fidelity to high-fidelity. These approaches can lead to the undesirable propagation of errors from low-fidelity representations to high-fidelity ones. We propose a novel framework called Disentangled Multi-fidelity Deep Bayesian Active Learning (D-MFDAL), which learns the surrogate models conditioned on the distribution of functions at multiple fidelities. On benchmark tasks of learning deep surrogates of partial differential equations including heat equation, Poisson's equation and fluid simulations, our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art in prediction accuracy and sample efficiency.
Learning Physical Models that Can Respect Conservation Laws
Recent work in scientific machine learning (SciML) has focused on incorporating partial differential equation (PDE) information into the learning process. Much of this work has focused on relatively ``easy'' PDE operators (e.g., elliptic and parabolic), with less emphasis on relatively ``hard'' PDE operators (e.g., hyperbolic). Within numerical PDEs, the latter problem class requires control of a type of volume element or conservation constraint, which is known to be challenging. Delivering on the promise of SciML requires seamlessly incorporating both types of problems into the learning process. To address this issue, we propose ProbConserv, a framework for incorporating conservation constraints into a generic SciML architecture. To do so, ProbConserv combines the integral form of a conservation law with a Bayesian update. We provide a detailed analysis of ProbConserv on learning with the Generalized Porous Medium Equation (GPME), a widely-applicable parameterized family of PDEs that illustrates the qualitative properties of both easier and harder PDEs. ProbConserv is effective for easy GPME variants, performing well with state-of-the-art competitors; and for harder GPME variants it outperforms other approaches that do not guarantee volume conservation. ProbConserv seamlessly enforces physical conservation constraints, maintains probabilistic uncertainty quantification (UQ), and deals well with shocks and heteroscedasticities. In each case, it achieves superior predictive performance on downstream tasks.
LESnets (Large-Eddy Simulation nets): Physics-informed neural operator for large-eddy simulation of turbulence
Acquisition of large datasets for three-dimensional (3D) partial differential equations are usually very expensive. Physics-informed neural operator (PINO) eliminates the high costs associated with generation of training datasets, and shows great potential in a variety of partial differential equations. In this work, we employ physics-informed neural operator, encoding the large-eddy simulation (LES) equations directly into the neural operator for simulating three-dimensional incompressible turbulent flows. We develop the LESnets (Large-Eddy Simulation nets) by adding large-eddy simulation equations to two different data-driven models, including Fourier neural operator (FNO) and implicit Fourier neural operator (IFNO) without using label data. Notably, by leveraging only PDE constraints to learn the spatio-temporal dynamics problem, LESnets retains the computational efficiency of data-driven approaches while obviating the necessity for data. Meanwhile, using large-eddy simulation equations as PDE constraints makes it possible to efficiently predict complex turbulence at coarse grids. We investigate the performance of the LESnets with two standard three-dimensional turbulent flows: decaying homogeneous isotropic turbulence and temporally evolving turbulent mixing layer. In the numerical experiments, the LESnets model shows a similar or even better accuracy as compared to traditional large-eddy simulation and data-driven models of FNO and IFNO. Moreover, the well-trained LESnets is significantly faster than traditional LES, and has a similar efficiency as the data-driven FNO and IFNO models. Thus, physics-informed neural operators have a strong potential for 3D nonlinear engineering applications.
A Learnable Prior Improves Inverse Tumor Growth Modeling
Biophysical modeling, particularly involving partial differential equations (PDEs), offers significant potential for tailoring disease treatment protocols to individual patients. However, the inverse problem-solving aspect of these models presents a substantial challenge, either due to the high computational requirements of model-based approaches or the limited robustness of deep learning (DL) methods. We propose a novel framework that leverages the unique strengths of both approaches in a synergistic manner. Our method incorporates a DL ensemble for initial parameter estimation, facilitating efficient downstream evolutionary sampling initialized with this DL-based prior. We showcase the effectiveness of integrating a rapid deep-learning algorithm with a high-precision evolution strategy in estimating brain tumor cell concentrations from magnetic resonance images. The DL-Prior plays a pivotal role, significantly constraining the effective sampling-parameter space. This reduction results in a fivefold convergence acceleration and a Dice-score of 95%
Learning the Solution Operator of Boundary Value Problems using Graph Neural Networks
As an alternative to classical numerical solvers for partial differential equations (PDEs) subject to boundary value constraints, there has been a surge of interest in investigating neural networks that can solve such problems efficiently. In this work, we design a general solution operator for two different time-independent PDEs using graph neural networks (GNNs) and spectral graph convolutions. We train the networks on simulated data from a finite elements solver on a variety of shapes and inhomogeneities. In contrast to previous works, we focus on the ability of the trained operator to generalize to previously unseen scenarios. Specifically, we test generalization to meshes with different shapes and superposition of solutions for a different number of inhomogeneities. We find that training on a diverse dataset with lots of variation in the finite element meshes is a key ingredient for achieving good generalization results in all cases. With this, we believe that GNNs can be used to learn solution operators that generalize over a range of properties and produce solutions much faster than a generic solver. Our dataset, which we make publicly available, can be used and extended to verify the robustness of these models under varying conditions.
Real vs. Complex Spectral Bases for Neural Operators: The Role of Green's Function Alignment
Fourier Neural Operators (FNO) learn solution operators of partial differential equations by parameterizing global convolutions in the complex Fourier domain. For real-valued PDE solutions, the complex FFT carries representational redundancy through conjugate symmetry. We introduce the Hartley Neural Operator (HNO), the exact real-valued mirror of FNO: it replaces the FFT with the purely real Discrete Hartley Transform and learns a single real multiplier per retained spectral mode, with no complex arithmetic. Because the real Hartley spectrum is not halved by conjugate symmetry, HNO retains twice as many frequency corners as FNO but one real weight where FNO carries a complex pair, so the two operators are iso-parametric at equal width and differ only in spectral basis. Our central thesis is that the best basis is a property of the operator. Self-adjoint elliptic operators (Poisson, biharmonic) have real, symmetric Green's functions that the real Hartley multiplier diagonalizes exactly, and HNO is favored there. Time-dependent operators carry phase, from oscillation in the wave equation to transport in advection, Burgers, and Navier-Stokes, which a real diagonal multiplier cannot represent, so FNO is favored there, and increasingly so with the operator's phase content, leaving the phaseless heat equation as the borderline case. Training both operators identically and benchmarking across PDE classes, initial-condition families, and boundary conditions, we find an elliptic-versus-time-dependent split that is monotone in operator phase content and matches the Green's-function theory we develop. Rather than a universal winner, our findings give a predictive rule: match the spectral basis to the symmetry of the solution operator.
Operator Learning with Domain Decomposition for Geometry Generalization in PDE Solving
Neural operators have become increasingly popular in solving partial differential equations (PDEs) due to their superior capability to capture intricate mappings between function spaces over complex domains. However, the data-hungry nature of operator learning inevitably poses a bottleneck for their widespread applications. At the core of the challenge lies the absence of transferability of neural operators to new geometries. To tackle this issue, we propose operator learning with domain decomposition, a local-to-global framework to solve PDEs on arbitrary geometries. Under this framework, we devise an iterative scheme Schwarz Neural Inference (SNI). This scheme allows for partitioning of the problem domain into smaller subdomains, on which local problems can be solved with neural operators, and stitching local solutions to construct a global solution. Additionally, we provide a theoretical analysis of the convergence rate and error bound. We conduct extensive experiments on several representative PDEs with diverse boundary conditions and achieve remarkable geometry generalization compared to alternative methods. These analysis and experiments demonstrate the proposed framework's potential in addressing challenges related to geometry generalization and data efficiency.
Test-time Generalization for Physics through Neural Operator Splitting
Neural operators have shown promise in learning solution maps of partial differential equations (PDEs), but they often struggle to generalize when test inputs lie outside the training distribution, such as novel initial conditions, unseen PDE coefficients or unseen physics. Prior works address this limitation with large-scale multiple physics pretraining followed by fine-tuning, but this still requires examples from the new dynamics, falling short of true zero-shot generalization. In this work, we propose a method to enhance generalization at test time, i.e., without modifying pretrained weights. Building on DISCO, which provides a dictionary of neural operators trained across different dynamics, we introduce a neural operator splitting strategy that, at test time, searches over compositions of training operators to approximate unseen dynamics. On challenging out-of-distribution tasks including parameter extrapolation and novel combinations of physics phenomena, our approach achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot generalization results, while being able to recover the underlying PDE parameters. These results underscore test-time computation as a key avenue for building flexible, compositional, and generalizable neural operators.
PEGNet: A Physics-Embedded Graph Network for Long-Term Stable Multiphysics Simulation
Accurate and efficient simulations of physical phenomena governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) are important for scientific and engineering progress. While traditional numerical solvers are powerful, they are often computationally expensive. Recently, data-driven methods have emerged as alternatives, but they frequently suffer from error accumulation and limited physical consistency, especially in multiphysics and complex geometries. To address these challenges, we propose PEGNet, a Physics-Embedded Graph Network that incorporates PDE-guided message passing to redesign the graph neural network architecture. By embedding key PDE dynamics like convection, viscosity, and diffusion into distinct message functions, the model naturally integrates physical constraints into its forward propagation, producing more stable and physically consistent solutions. Additionally, a hierarchical architecture is employed to capture multi-scale features, and physical regularization is integrated into the loss function to further enforce adherence to governing physics. We evaluated PEGNet on benchmarks, including custom datasets for respiratory airflow and drug delivery, showing significant improvements in long-term prediction accuracy and physical consistency over existing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yanghuoshan/PEGNet.
Nonlinear energy-preserving model reduction with lifting transformations that quadratize the energy
Existing model reduction techniques for high-dimensional models of conservative partial differential equations (PDEs) encounter computational bottlenecks when dealing with systems featuring non-polynomial nonlinearities. This work presents a nonlinear model reduction method that employs lifting variable transformations to derive structure-preserving quadratic reduced-order models for conservative PDEs with general nonlinearities. We present an energy-quadratization strategy that defines the auxiliary variable in terms of the nonlinear term in the energy expression to derive an equivalent quadratic lifted system with quadratic system energy. The proposed strategy combined with proper orthogonal decomposition model reduction yields quadratic reduced-order models that conserve the quadratized lifted energy exactly in high dimensions. We demonstrate the proposed model reduction approach on four nonlinear conservative PDEs: the one-dimensional wave equation with exponential nonlinearity, the two-dimensional sine-Gordon equation, the two-dimensional Klein-Gordon equation with parametric dependence, and the two-dimensional Klein-Gordon-Zakharov equations. The numerical results show that the proposed lifting approach is competitive with the state-of-the-art structure-preserving hyper-reduction method in terms of both accuracy and computational efficiency in the online stage while providing significant computational gains in the offline stage.
Transolver++: An Accurate Neural Solver for PDEs on Million-Scale Geometries
Although deep models have been widely explored in solving partial differential equations (PDEs), previous works are primarily limited to data only with up to tens of thousands of mesh points, far from the million-point scale required by industrial simulations that involve complex geometries. In the spirit of advancing neural PDE solvers to real industrial applications, we present Transolver++, a highly parallel and efficient neural solver that can accurately solve PDEs on million-scale geometries. Building upon previous advancements in solving PDEs by learning physical states via Transolver, Transolver++ is further equipped with an extremely optimized parallelism framework and a local adaptive mechanism to efficiently capture eidetic physical states from massive mesh points, successfully tackling the thorny challenges in computation and physics learning when scaling up input mesh size. Transolver++ increases the single-GPU input capacity to million-scale points for the first time and is capable of continuously scaling input size in linear complexity by increasing GPUs. Experimentally, Transolver++ yields 13% relative promotion across six standard PDE benchmarks and achieves over 20% performance gain in million-scale high-fidelity industrial simulations, whose sizes are 100times larger than previous benchmarks, covering car and 3D aircraft designs.
Learning Lagrangian Interaction Dynamics with Sampling-Based Model Order Reduction
Simulating physical systems governed by Lagrangian dynamics often entails solving partial differential equations (PDEs) over high-resolution spatial domains, leading to significant computational expense. Reduced-order modeling (ROM) mitigates this cost by evolving low-dimensional latent representations of the underlying system. While neural ROMs enable querying solutions from latent states at arbitrary spatial points, their latent states typically represent the global domain and struggle to capture localized, highly dynamic behaviors such as fluids. We propose a sampling-based reduction framework that evolves Lagrangian systems directly in physical space over the particles themselves, reducing the number of active degrees of freedom via data-driven neural PDE operators. To enable querying at arbitrary spatial locations, we introduce a learnable kernel parameterization that uses local spatial information from time-evolved sample particles to infer the underlying solution manifold. Empirically, our approach achieves a 6.6x to 32x reduction in input dimensionality while maintaining high-fidelity evaluations across diverse Lagrangian regimes, including fluid flows, granular media, and elastoplastic dynamics. We refer to this framework as GIOROM (Geometry-Informed Reduced-Order Modeling). All code and data are available at: https://github.com/HrishikeshVish/GIOROM
Tackling the Curse of Dimensionality with Physics-Informed Neural Networks
The curse-of-dimensionality taxes computational resources heavily with exponentially increasing computational cost as the dimension increases. This poses great challenges in solving high-dimensional PDEs, as Richard E. Bellman first pointed out over 60 years ago. While there has been some recent success in solving numerically partial differential equations (PDEs) in high dimensions, such computations are prohibitively expensive, and true scaling of general nonlinear PDEs to high dimensions has never been achieved. We develop a new method of scaling up physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to solve arbitrary high-dimensional PDEs. The new method, called Stochastic Dimension Gradient Descent (SDGD), decomposes a gradient of PDEs into pieces corresponding to different dimensions and randomly samples a subset of these dimensional pieces in each iteration of training PINNs. We prove theoretically the convergence and other desired properties of the proposed method. We demonstrate in various diverse tests that the proposed method can solve many notoriously hard high-dimensional PDEs, including the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) and the Schrödinger equations in tens of thousands of dimensions very fast on a single GPU using the PINNs mesh-free approach. Notably, we solve nonlinear PDEs with nontrivial, anisotropic, and inseparable solutions in 100,000 effective dimensions in 12 hours on a single GPU using SDGD with PINNs. Since SDGD is a general training methodology of PINNs, it can be applied to any current and future variants of PINNs to scale them up for arbitrary high-dimensional PDEs.
Real-time Inference and Extrapolation via a Diffusion-inspired Temporal Transformer Operator (DiTTO)
Extrapolation remains a grand challenge in deep neural networks across all application domains. We propose an operator learning method to solve time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) continuously and with extrapolation in time without any temporal discretization. The proposed method, named Diffusion-inspired Temporal Transformer Operator (DiTTO), is inspired by latent diffusion models and their conditioning mechanism, which we use to incorporate the temporal evolution of the PDE, in combination with elements from the transformer architecture to improve its capabilities. Upon training, DiTTO can make inferences in real-time. We demonstrate its extrapolation capability on a climate problem by estimating the temperature around the globe for several years, and also in modeling hypersonic flows around a double-cone. We propose different training strategies involving temporal-bundling and sub-sampling and demonstrate performance improvements for several benchmarks, performing extrapolation for long time intervals as well as zero-shot super-resolution in time.
A domain splitting strategy for solving PDEs
In this work we develop a novel domain splitting strategy for the solution of partial differential equations. Focusing on a uniform discretization of the d-dimensional advection-diffusion equation, our proposal is a two-level algorithm that merges the solutions obtained from the discretization of the equation over highly anisotropic submeshes to compute an initial approximation of the fine solution. The algorithm then iteratively refines the initial guess by leveraging the structure of the residual. Performing costly calculations on anisotropic submeshes enable us to reduce the dimensionality of the problem by one, and the merging process, which involves the computation of solutions over disjoint domains, allows for parallel implementation.
NeuralStagger: Accelerating Physics-constrained Neural PDE Solver with Spatial-temporal Decomposition
Neural networks have shown great potential in accelerating the solution of partial differential equations (PDEs). Recently, there has been a growing interest in introducing physics constraints into training neural PDE solvers to reduce the use of costly data and improve the generalization ability. However, these physics constraints, based on certain finite dimensional approximations over the function space, must resolve the smallest scaled physics to ensure the accuracy and stability of the simulation, resulting in high computational costs from large input, output, and neural networks. This paper proposes a general acceleration methodology called NeuralStagger by spatially and temporally decomposing the original learning tasks into several coarser-resolution subtasks. We define a coarse-resolution neural solver for each subtask, which requires fewer computational resources, and jointly train them with the vanilla physics-constrained loss by simply arranging their outputs to reconstruct the original solution. Due to the perfect parallelism between them, the solution is achieved as fast as a coarse-resolution neural solver. In addition, the trained solvers bring the flexibility of simulating with multiple levels of resolution. We demonstrate the successful application of NeuralStagger on 2D and 3D fluid dynamics simulations, which leads to an additional 10sim100times speed-up. Moreover, the experiment also shows that the learned model could be well used for optimal control.
Solving High-Dimensional PDEs with Latent Spectral Models
Deep models have achieved impressive progress in solving partial differential equations (PDEs). A burgeoning paradigm is learning neural operators to approximate the input-output mappings of PDEs. While previous deep models have explored the multiscale architectures and various operator designs, they are limited to learning the operators as a whole in the coordinate space. In real physical science problems, PDEs are complex coupled equations with numerical solvers relying on discretization into high-dimensional coordinate space, which cannot be precisely approximated by a single operator nor efficiently learned due to the curse of dimensionality. We present Latent Spectral Models (LSM) toward an efficient and precise solver for high-dimensional PDEs. Going beyond the coordinate space, LSM enables an attention-based hierarchical projection network to reduce the high-dimensional data into a compact latent space in linear time. Inspired by classical spectral methods in numerical analysis, we design a neural spectral block to solve PDEs in the latent space that approximates complex input-output mappings via learning multiple basis operators, enjoying nice theoretical guarantees for convergence and approximation. Experimentally, LSM achieves consistent state-of-the-art and yields a relative gain of 11.5% averaged on seven benchmarks covering both solid and fluid physics. Code is available at https://github.com/thuml/Latent-Spectral-Models.
Fourier Neural Operator with Learned Deformations for PDEs on General Geometries
Deep learning surrogate models have shown promise in solving partial differential equations (PDEs). Among them, the Fourier neural operator (FNO) achieves good accuracy, and is significantly faster compared to numerical solvers, on a variety of PDEs, such as fluid flows. However, the FNO uses the Fast Fourier transform (FFT), which is limited to rectangular domains with uniform grids. In this work, we propose a new framework, viz., geo-FNO, to solve PDEs on arbitrary geometries. Geo-FNO learns to deform the input (physical) domain, which may be irregular, into a latent space with a uniform grid. The FNO model with the FFT is applied in the latent space. The resulting geo-FNO model has both the computation efficiency of FFT and the flexibility of handling arbitrary geometries. Our geo-FNO is also flexible in terms of its input formats, viz., point clouds, meshes, and design parameters are all valid inputs. We consider a variety of PDEs such as the Elasticity, Plasticity, Euler's, and Navier-Stokes equations, and both forward modeling and inverse design problems. Geo-FNO is 10^5 times faster than the standard numerical solvers and twice more accurate compared to direct interpolation on existing ML-based PDE solvers such as the standard FNO.
Mitigating Propagation Failures in Physics-informed Neural Networks using Retain-Resample-Release (R3) Sampling
Despite the success of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) in approximating partial differential equations (PDEs), PINNs can sometimes fail to converge to the correct solution in problems involving complicated PDEs. This is reflected in several recent studies on characterizing the "failure modes" of PINNs, although a thorough understanding of the connection between PINN failure modes and sampling strategies is missing. In this paper, we provide a novel perspective of failure modes of PINNs by hypothesizing that training PINNs relies on successful "propagation" of solution from initial and/or boundary condition points to interior points. We show that PINNs with poor sampling strategies can get stuck at trivial solutions if there are propagation failures, characterized by highly imbalanced PDE residual fields. To mitigate propagation failures, we propose a novel Retain-Resample-Release sampling (R3) algorithm that can incrementally accumulate collocation points in regions of high PDE residuals with little to no computational overhead. We provide an extension of R3 sampling to respect the principle of causality while solving time-dependent PDEs. We theoretically analyze the behavior of R3 sampling and empirically demonstrate its efficacy and efficiency in comparison with baselines on a variety of PDE problems.
PDE-SSM: A Spectral State Space Approach to Spatial Mixing in Diffusion Transformers
The success of vision transformers-especially for generative modeling-is limited by the quadratic cost and weak spatial inductive bias of self-attention. We propose PDE-SSM, a spatial state-space block that replaces attention with a learnable convection-diffusion-reaction partial differential equation. This operator encodes a strong spatial prior by modeling information flow via physically grounded dynamics rather than all-to-all token interactions. Solving the PDE in the Fourier domain yields global coupling with near-linear complexity of O(N log N), delivering a principled and scalable alternative to attention. We integrate PDE-SSM into a flow-matching generative model to obtain the PDE-based Diffusion Transformer PDE-SSM-DiT. Empirically, PDE-SSM-DiT matches or exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art Diffusion Transformers while substantially reducing compute. Our results show that, analogous to 1D settings where SSMs supplant attention, multi-dimensional PDE operators provide an efficient, inductive-bias-rich foundation for next-generation vision models.
Lagrangian PINNs: A causality-conforming solution to failure modes of physics-informed neural networks
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) leverage neural-networks to find the solutions of partial differential equation (PDE)-constrained optimization problems with initial conditions and boundary conditions as soft constraints. These soft constraints are often considered to be the sources of the complexity in the training phase of PINNs. Here, we demonstrate that the challenge of training (i) persists even when the boundary conditions are strictly enforced, and (ii) is closely related to the Kolmogorov n-width associated with problems demonstrating transport, convection, traveling waves, or moving fronts. Given this realization, we describe the mechanism underlying the training schemes such as those used in eXtended PINNs (XPINN), curriculum regularization, and sequence-to-sequence learning. For an important category of PDEs, i.e., governed by non-linear convection-diffusion equation, we propose reformulating PINNs on a Lagrangian frame of reference, i.e., LPINNs, as a PDE-informed solution. A parallel architecture with two branches is proposed. One branch solves for the state variables on the characteristics, and the second branch solves for the low-dimensional characteristics curves. The proposed architecture conforms to the causality innate to the convection, and leverages the direction of travel of the information in the domain. Finally, we demonstrate that the loss landscapes of LPINNs are less sensitive to the so-called "complexity" of the problems, compared to those in the traditional PINNs in the Eulerian framework.
PDE-Agents: An LLM-Orchestrated Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Finite Element Simulations with Knowledge Graph-Augmented Reasoning
We present PDE-Agents, a multi-agent ecosystem that automates the full lifecycle of partial differential equation (PDE) / finite element method (FEM) simulations through natural-language interaction. Three specialist large language model (LLM) agents (Simulation, Analytics, Database) are orchestrated via a LangGraph supervisor, with a local open-source LLM stack (Qwen3-Coder-Next, Llama 4 Scout) on dual NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 GPUs. The architecture is model-agnostic, validated across two LLM generations. A GraphRAG knowledge base (Neo4j, 768-d vector embeddings) encodes curated material properties, known failure patterns, and prior run lineage. We report seven contributions: (i) a verification and validation (V&V) study confirming second-order spatial convergence (O(h^2)) on the heat-equation solver; (ii) a three-way ablation over 50 tasks with a frozen KG (KG On, KG Off, KG Smart), where KG Smart reaches 100% success and the highest output quality (physics 0.933 vs. 0.853 for KG Off; MPF 0.926 vs. 0.796); (iii) a novel-material experiment with three fictional materials known only to the KG, where KG Smart attains near-perfect material property fidelity (MPF = 1.00) versus 0.34 for the KG-free baseline; (iv) a failure analysis tracing KG On's three failures to budget exhaustion and timeout, establishing warm-start injection as the dominant reliability factor; (v) an adaptive framework selecting the optimal retrieval mode per task; (vi) production metrics from 1,369 runs (97.8% success, 57.6% first-try); and (vii) a 100-task KG growth experiment showing a difficulty-dependent gain, with hard-task MPF improving 8.8% while easy/novel tasks stay at ceiling. All code, models, and evaluation artifacts are released openly. Our findings show that integration pattern, not knowledge content, determines whether GraphRAG augmentation helps or hinders LLM agents.
FluxNet: Learning Capacity-Constrained Local Transport Operators for Conservative and Bounded PDE Surrogates
Autoregressive learning of time-stepping operators provides an effective approach to data-driven partial differential equation (PDE) simulation, yet for conservation laws, they face a fundamental challenge: learned updates may violate global conservation over long rollouts. For the important subclass of mass-conservation-type equations, the problem is compounded by inherent physical bounds (e.g., nonnegativity or concentrations in [0,1]) whose violation further destabilizes predictions. We introduce FluxNet, which learns cumulative transport amounts representing the total conserved quantity redistributed between each cell and a configurable neighborhood over the full surrogate interval. A conservative update guarantees exact discrete conservation by construction; modular capacity-constrained transport heads (L, U, and D) enforce lower bounds, upper bounds, or near-zero dual-bound violations through architectural design. Unlike flux-rate surrogates that require temporal integration and thus inherit CFL constraints, FluxNet involves no such integration; configurable transport neighborhoods enable large-timestep prediction at full spatial resolution. Ghost cells extend the framework to non-periodic boundaries. Experiments on four benchmarks (1D convection--diffusion, 2D shallow water, 1D traffic flow, 2D Cahn--Hilliard) demonstrate exact conservation, structural bound preservation, architecture modularity, and superior stability over flux-rate surrogates at large temporal strides. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Lan-zs/FluxNet.
PDEAgent-Bench: A Multi-Metric, Multi-Library Benchmark for PDE Solver Generation
PDE-to-solver code generation aims to automatically synthesize executable numerical solvers from partial differential equation (PDE) specifications. This task requires not only understanding the mathematical structure of PDEs, but also selecting appropriate discretization schemes and solver configurations, and correctly implementing the resulting formulations in finite-element method (FEM) libraries. Existing code generation benchmarks mainly evaluate syntactic correctness, or success on predefined test cases. To our knowledge, there is currently no publicly available benchmark specifically for PDE-to-solver code generation, and general-purpose code benchmarks do not fully capture the unique challenges of numerical PDE solution, such as ensuring solver accuracy, efficiency, and compatibility with professional FEM libraries. We introduce PDEAgent-Bench, to the best of our knowledge, the first multi-metric, multi-library benchmark for PDE-to-solver code generation. PDEAgent-Bench contains 645 instances across 6 mathematical categories and 11 PDE families, with common FEM libraries for DOLFINx, Firedrake, and deal.II. Each instance provides an agent-facing problem specification, a reference solution on a prescribed evaluation grid, and case-specific accuracy and runtime targets. PDEAgent-Bench adopts a staged evaluation framework in which generated solvers must sequentially pass executability, numerical accuracy, and computational efficiency checks. Experiments with representative LLMs and code agents show that models can often produce runnable code, but their pass rate drops substantially once accuracy and efficiency requirements are enforced. These results indicate that current agents remain limited in producing numerically reliable and efficient PDE solvers, and that PDEAgent-Bench provides a reproducible testbed grounded in the practical requirements of numerical PDE solving.
Conditional Clifford-Steerable CNNs with Complete Kernel Basis for PDE Modeling
Clifford-Steerable CNNs (CSCNNs) provide a unified framework that allows incorporating equivariance to arbitrary pseudo-Euclidean groups, including isometries of Euclidean space and Minkowski spacetime. In this work, we demonstrate that the kernel basis of CSCNNs is not complete, thus limiting the model expressivity. To address this issue, we propose Conditional Clifford-Steerable Kernels, which augment the kernels with equivariant representations computed from the input feature field. We derive the equivariance constraint for these input-dependent kernels and show how it can be solved efficiently via implicit parameterization. We empirically demonstrate an improved expressivity of the resulting framework on multiple PDE forecasting tasks, including fluid dynamics and relativistic electrodynamics, where our method consistently outperforms baseline methods.
Momentum-based minimization of the Ginzburg-Landau functional on Euclidean spaces and graphs
We study the momentum-based minimization of a diffuse perimeter functional on Euclidean spaces and on graphs with applications to semi-supervised classification tasks in machine learning. While the gradient flow in the task at hand is a parabolic partial differential equation, the momentum-method corresponds to a damped hyperbolic PDE, leading to qualitatively and quantitatively different trajectories. Using a convex-concave splitting-based FISTA-type time discretization, we demonstrate empirically that momentum can lead to faster convergence if the time step size is large but not too large. With large time steps, the PDE analysis offers only limited insight into the geometric behavior of solutions and typical hyperbolic phenomena like loss of regularity are not be observed in sample simulations.
High-performance symbolic-numerics via multiple dispatch
As mathematical computing becomes more democratized in high-level languages, high-performance symbolic-numeric systems are necessary for domain scientists and engineers to get the best performance out of their machine without deep knowledge of code optimization. Naturally, users need different term types either to have different algebraic properties for them, or to use efficient data structures. To this end, we developed Symbolics.jl, an extendable symbolic system which uses dynamic multiple dispatch to change behavior depending on the domain needs. In this work we detail an underlying abstract term interface which allows for speed without sacrificing generality. We show that by formalizing a generic API on actions independent of implementation, we can retroactively add optimized data structures to our system without changing the pre-existing term rewriters. We showcase how this can be used to optimize term construction and give a 113x acceleration on general symbolic transformations. Further, we show that such a generic API allows for complementary term-rewriting implementations. We demonstrate the ability to swap between classical term-rewriting simplifiers and e-graph-based term-rewriting simplifiers. We showcase an e-graph ruleset which minimizes the number of CPU cycles during expression evaluation, and demonstrate how it simplifies a real-world reaction-network simulation to halve the runtime. Additionally, we show a reaction-diffusion partial differential equation solver which is able to be automatically converted into symbolic expressions via multiple dispatch tracing, which is subsequently accelerated and parallelized to give a 157x simulation speedup. Together, this presents Symbolics.jl as a next-generation symbolic-numeric computing environment geared towards modeling and simulation.
Pretraining Codomain Attention Neural Operators for Solving Multiphysics PDEs
Existing neural operator architectures face challenges when solving multiphysics problems with coupled partial differential equations (PDEs) due to complex geometries, interactions between physical variables, and the limited amounts of high-resolution training data. To address these issues, we propose Codomain Attention Neural Operator (CoDA-NO), which tokenizes functions along the codomain or channel space, enabling self-supervised learning or pretraining of multiple PDE systems. Specifically, we extend positional encoding, self-attention, and normalization layers to function spaces. CoDA-NO can learn representations of different PDE systems with a single model. We evaluate CoDA-NO's potential as a backbone for learning multiphysics PDEs over multiple systems by considering few-shot learning settings. On complex downstream tasks with limited data, such as fluid flow simulations, fluid-structure interactions, and Rayleigh-B\'enard convection, we found CoDA-NO to outperform existing methods by over 36%.
Meta Learning of Interface Conditions for Multi-Domain Physics-Informed Neural Networks
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are emerging as popular mesh-free solvers for partial differential equations (PDEs). Recent extensions decompose the domain, applying different PINNs to solve the equation in each subdomain and aligning the solution at the interface of the subdomains. Hence, they can further alleviate the problem complexity, reduce the computational cost, and allow parallelization. However, the performance of the multi-domain PINNs is sensitive to the choice of the interface conditions for solution alignment. While quite a few conditions have been proposed, there is no suggestion about how to select the conditions according to specific problems. To address this gap, we propose META Learning of Interface Conditions (METALIC), a simple, efficient yet powerful approach to dynamically determine the optimal interface conditions for solving a family of parametric PDEs. Specifically, we develop two contextual multi-arm bandit models. The first one applies to the entire training procedure, and online updates a Gaussian process (GP) reward surrogate that given the PDE parameters and interface conditions predicts the solution error. The second one partitions the training into two stages, one is the stochastic phase and the other deterministic phase; we update a GP surrogate for each phase to enable different condition selections at the two stages so as to further bolster the flexibility and performance. We have shown the advantage of METALIC on four bench-mark PDE families.
From Simple to Complex: Curriculum-Guided Physics-Informed Neural Networks via Gaussian Mixture Models
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) offer a mesh-free framework for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), yet training often suffers from gradient pathologies, spectral bias, and poor convergence, especially for problems with strong nonlinearity, sharp gradients, or multiscale features. We propose the Curriculum-Guided Gaussian Mixture Physics-Informed Neural Network (CGMPINN), which integrates Gaussian mixture modeling with dynamic curriculum learning. Specifically, a GMM is periodically fitted to the PDE residual distribution to quantify spatially varying learning difficulty. A smooth curriculum schedule progressively shifts training focus from easy to harder regions, while precision-based variance modulation suppresses unreliable clusters during early optimization. This dual curriculum is governed by a shared curriculum parameter and can be combined with self-adaptive loss balancing. We further establish theoretical guarantees, including sublinear convergence of the gradient norm for the induced time-varying loss, uniform equivalence between the curriculum-weighted and standard PDE losses, and a generalization bound with an explicit weighting-induced bias characterization. Experiments on six benchmark PDEs spanning elliptic, parabolic, hyperbolic, advection-dominated, and nonlinear reaction-diffusion types show that CGMPINN consistently achieves the lowest relative L_2 and maximum absolute errors among all compared methods, reducing relative L_2 error by up to 97.8\% over the standard PINN at comparable cost. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Mathematics-Yang/CGMPINN.
Diagnosing Failure Modes of Neural Operators Across Diverse PDE Families
Neural PDE solvers are increasingly used as learned surrogates for families of partial differential equations, where the key machine learning challenge is not only interpolation on a fixed benchmark distribution but generalization under structured shifts in coefficients, boundary conditions, discretization, and rollout horizon. Yet evaluation is still often dominated by in-distribution test error, making robustness difficult to assess. We introduce a standardized stress-testing framework for neural PDE solvers under deployment-relevant shift. We instantiate it on three representative architectures -- Fourier Neural Operators (FNOs), a DeepONet-style model, and convolutional neural operators (CNOs) -- across five qualitatively different PDE families: dispersive, elliptic, multi-scale fluid, financial, and chaotic systems. Across 750 trained models, we measure robustness using baseline-normalized degradation factors together with spectral and rollout diagnostics. The resulting comparisons reveal that strong in-distribution accuracy does not reliably predict robustness, and that failure patterns depend jointly on architecture and PDE family. Our results provide a clearer basis for evaluating robustness claims in neural PDE solvers and suggest that function-space generalization under structured shift should be treated as a first-class evaluation target.
AutoNumerics: An Autonomous, PDE-Agnostic Multi-Agent Pipeline for Scientific Computing
PDEs are central to scientific and engineering modeling, yet designing accurate numerical solvers typically requires substantial mathematical expertise and manual tuning. Recent neural network-based approaches improve flexibility but often demand high computational cost and suffer from limited interpretability. We introduce AutoNumerics, a multi-agent framework that autonomously designs, implements, debugs, and verifies numerical solvers for general PDEs directly from natural language descriptions. Unlike black-box neural solvers, our framework generates transparent solvers grounded in classical numerical analysis. We introduce a coarse-to-fine execution strategy and a residual-based self-verification mechanism. Experiments on 24 canonical and real-world PDE problems demonstrate that AutoNumerics achieves competitive or superior accuracy compared to existing neural and LLM-based baselines, and correctly selects numerical schemes based on PDE structural properties, suggesting its viability as an accessible paradigm for automated PDE solving.
Neuro-Spectral Architectures for Causal Physics-Informed Networks
Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have emerged as a powerful framework for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). However, standard MLP-based PINNs often fail to converge when dealing with complex initial value problems, leading to solutions that violate causality and suffer from a spectral bias towards low-frequency components. To address these issues, we introduce NeuSA (Neuro-Spectral Architectures), a novel class of PINNs inspired by classical spectral methods, designed to solve linear and nonlinear PDEs with variable coefficients. NeuSA learns a projection of the underlying PDE onto a spectral basis, leading to a finite-dimensional representation of the dynamics which is then integrated with an adapted Neural ODE (NODE). This allows us to overcome spectral bias, by leveraging the high-frequency components enabled by the spectral representation; to enforce causality, by inheriting the causal structure of NODEs, and to start training near the target solution, by means of an initialization scheme based on classical methods. We validate NeuSA on canonical benchmarks for linear and nonlinear wave equations, demonstrating strong performance as compared to other architectures, with faster convergence, improved temporal consistency and superior predictive accuracy. Code and pretrained models are available in https://github.com/arthur-bizzi/neusa.
Panda: A pretrained forecast model for universal representation of chaotic dynamics
Chaotic systems are intrinsically sensitive to small errors, challenging efforts to construct predictive data-driven models of real-world dynamical systems such as fluid flows or neuronal activity. Prior efforts comprise either specialized models trained separately on individual time series, or foundation models trained on vast time series databases with little underlying dynamical structure. Motivated by dynamical systems theory, we present Panda, Patched Attention for Nonlinear DynAmics. We train Panda on a novel synthetic, extensible dataset of 2 times 10^4 chaotic dynamical systems that we discover using an evolutionary algorithm. Trained purely on simulated data, Panda exhibits emergent properties: zero-shot forecasting of unseen real world chaotic systems, and nonlinear resonance patterns in cross-channel attention heads. Despite having been trained only on low-dimensional ordinary differential equations, Panda spontaneously develops the ability to predict partial differential equations without retraining. We demonstrate a neural scaling law for differential equations, underscoring the potential of pretrained models for probing abstract mathematical domains like nonlinear dynamics.
$PINN - a Domain Decomposition Method for Bayesian Physics-Informed Neural Networks
Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) are a novel computational approach for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) with noisy and sparse initial and boundary data. Although, efficient quantification of epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties in big multi-scale problems remains challenging. We propose \PINN a novel method of computing global uncertainty in PDEs using a Bayesian framework, by combining local Bayesian Physics-Informed Neural Networks (BPINN) with domain decomposition. The solution continuity across subdomains is obtained by imposing the flux continuity across the interface of neighboring subdomains. To demonstrate the effectiveness of PINN, we conduct a series of computational experiments on PDEs in 1D and 2D spatial domains. Although we have adopted conservative PINNs (cPINNs), the method can be seamlessly extended to other domain decomposition techniques. The results infer that the proposed method recovers the global uncertainty by computing the local uncertainty exactly more efficiently as the uncertainty in each subdomain can be computed concurrently. The robustness of \$PINN is verified by adding uncorrelated random noise to the training data up to 15% and testing for different domain sizes.
Synergistic Learning with Multi-Task DeepONet for Efficient PDE Problem Solving
Multi-task learning (MTL) is an inductive transfer mechanism designed to leverage useful information from multiple tasks to improve generalization performance compared to single-task learning. It has been extensively explored in traditional machine learning to address issues such as data sparsity and overfitting in neural networks. In this work, we apply MTL to problems in science and engineering governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). However, implementing MTL in this context is complex, as it requires task-specific modifications to accommodate various scenarios representing different physical processes. To this end, we present a multi-task deep operator network (MT-DeepONet) to learn solutions across various functional forms of source terms in a PDE and multiple geometries in a single concurrent training session. We introduce modifications in the branch network of the vanilla DeepONet to account for various functional forms of a parameterized coefficient in a PDE. Additionally, we handle parameterized geometries by introducing a binary mask in the branch network and incorporating it into the loss term to improve convergence and generalization to new geometry tasks. Our approach is demonstrated on three benchmark problems: (1) learning different functional forms of the source term in the Fisher equation; (2) learning multiple geometries in a 2D Darcy Flow problem and showcasing better transfer learning capabilities to new geometries; and (3) learning 3D parameterized geometries for a heat transfer problem and demonstrate the ability to predict on new but similar geometries. Our MT-DeepONet framework offers a novel approach to solving PDE problems in engineering and science under a unified umbrella based on synergistic learning that reduces the overall training cost for neural operators.
Multi-Grid Tensorized Fourier Neural Operator for High-Resolution PDEs
Memory complexity and data scarcity have so far prohibited learning solution operators of partial differential equations (PDEs) at high resolutions. We address these limitations by introducing a new data efficient and highly parallelizable operator learning approach with reduced memory requirement and better generalization, called multi-grid tensorized neural operator (MG-TFNO). MG-TFNO scales to large resolutions by leveraging local and global structures of full-scale, real-world phenomena, through a decomposition of both the input domain and the operator's parameter space. Our contributions are threefold: i) we enable parallelization over input samples with a novel multi-grid-based domain decomposition, ii) we represent the parameters of the model in a high-order latent subspace of the Fourier domain, through a global tensor factorization, resulting in an extreme reduction in the number of parameters and improved generalization, and iii) we propose architectural improvements to the backbone FNO. Our approach can be used in any operator learning setting. We demonstrate superior performance on the turbulent Navier-Stokes equations where we achieve less than half the error with over 150x compression. The tensorization combined with the domain decomposition, yields over 150x reduction in the number of parameters and 7x reduction in the domain size without losses in accuracy, while slightly enabling parallelism.
MultiAdam: Parameter-wise Scale-invariant Optimizer for Multiscale Training of Physics-informed Neural Networks
Physics-informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have recently achieved remarkable progress in solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) in various fields by minimizing a weighted sum of PDE loss and boundary loss. However, there are several critical challenges in the training of PINNs, including the lack of theoretical frameworks and the imbalance between PDE loss and boundary loss. In this paper, we present an analysis of second-order non-homogeneous PDEs, which are classified into three categories and applicable to various common problems. We also characterize the connections between the training loss and actual error, guaranteeing convergence under mild conditions. The theoretical analysis inspires us to further propose MultiAdam, a scale-invariant optimizer that leverages gradient momentum to parameter-wisely balance the loss terms. Extensive experiment results on multiple problems from different physical domains demonstrate that our MultiAdam solver can improve the predictive accuracy by 1-2 orders of magnitude compared with strong baselines.
PDEBENCH: An Extensive Benchmark for Scientific Machine Learning
Machine learning-based modeling of physical systems has experienced increased interest in recent years. Despite some impressive progress, there is still a lack of benchmarks for Scientific ML that are easy to use but still challenging and representative of a wide range of problems. We introduce PDEBench, a benchmark suite of time-dependent simulation tasks based on Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). PDEBench comprises both code and data to benchmark the performance of novel machine learning models against both classical numerical simulations and machine learning baselines. Our proposed set of benchmark problems contribute the following unique features: (1) A much wider range of PDEs compared to existing benchmarks, ranging from relatively common examples to more realistic and difficult problems; (2) much larger ready-to-use datasets compared to prior work, comprising multiple simulation runs across a larger number of initial and boundary conditions and PDE parameters; (3) more extensible source codes with user-friendly APIs for data generation and baseline results with popular machine learning models (FNO, U-Net, PINN, Gradient-Based Inverse Method). PDEBench allows researchers to extend the benchmark freely for their own purposes using a standardized API and to compare the performance of new models to existing baseline methods. We also propose new evaluation metrics with the aim to provide a more holistic understanding of learning methods in the context of Scientific ML. With those metrics we identify tasks which are challenging for recent ML methods and propose these tasks as future challenges for the community. The code is available at https://github.com/pdebench/PDEBench.
Choose a Transformer: Fourier or Galerkin
In this paper, we apply the self-attention from the state-of-the-art Transformer in Attention Is All You Need for the first time to a data-driven operator learning problem related to partial differential equations. An effort is put together to explain the heuristics of, and to improve the efficacy of the attention mechanism. By employing the operator approximation theory in Hilbert spaces, it is demonstrated for the first time that the softmax normalization in the scaled dot-product attention is sufficient but not necessary. Without softmax, the approximation capacity of a linearized Transformer variant can be proved to be comparable to a Petrov-Galerkin projection layer-wise, and the estimate is independent with respect to the sequence length. A new layer normalization scheme mimicking the Petrov-Galerkin projection is proposed to allow a scaling to propagate through attention layers, which helps the model achieve remarkable accuracy in operator learning tasks with unnormalized data. Finally, we present three operator learning experiments, including the viscid Burgers' equation, an interface Darcy flow, and an inverse interface coefficient identification problem. The newly proposed simple attention-based operator learner, Galerkin Transformer, shows significant improvements in both training cost and evaluation accuracy over its softmax-normalized counterparts.
Text2PDE: Latent Diffusion Models for Accessible Physics Simulation
Recent advances in deep learning have inspired numerous works on data-driven solutions to partial differential equation (PDE) problems. These neural PDE solvers can often be much faster than their numerical counterparts; however, each presents its unique limitations and generally balances training cost, numerical accuracy, and ease of applicability to different problem setups. To address these limitations, we introduce several methods to apply latent diffusion models to physics simulation. Firstly, we introduce a mesh autoencoder to compress arbitrarily discretized PDE data, allowing for efficient diffusion training across various physics. Furthermore, we investigate full spatio-temporal solution generation to mitigate autoregressive error accumulation. Lastly, we investigate conditioning on initial physical quantities, as well as conditioning solely on a text prompt to introduce text2PDE generation. We show that language can be a compact, interpretable, and accurate modality for generating physics simulations, paving the way for more usable and accessible PDE solvers. Through experiments on both uniform and structured grids, we show that the proposed approach is competitive with current neural PDE solvers in both accuracy and efficiency, with promising scaling behavior up to sim3 billion parameters. By introducing a scalable, accurate, and usable physics simulator, we hope to bring neural PDE solvers closer to practical use.
Learning a Neural Solver for Parametric PDE to Enhance Physics-Informed Methods
Physics-informed deep learning often faces optimization challenges due to the complexity of solving partial differential equations (PDEs), which involve exploring large solution spaces, require numerous iterations, and can lead to unstable training. These challenges arise particularly from the ill-conditioning of the optimization problem caused by the differential terms in the loss function. To address these issues, we propose learning a solver, i.e., solving PDEs using a physics-informed iterative algorithm trained on data. Our method learns to condition a gradient descent algorithm that automatically adapts to each PDE instance, significantly accelerating and stabilizing the optimization process and enabling faster convergence of physics-aware models. Furthermore, while traditional physics-informed methods solve for a single PDE instance, our approach extends to parametric PDEs. Specifically, we integrate the physical loss gradient with PDE parameters, allowing our method to solve over a distribution of PDE parameters, including coefficients, initial conditions, and boundary conditions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through empirical experiments on multiple datasets, comparing both training and test-time optimization performance. The code is available at https://github.com/2ailesB/neural-parametric-solver.
ViTO: Vision Transformer-Operator
We combine vision transformers with operator learning to solve diverse inverse problems described by partial differential equations (PDEs). Our approach, named ViTO, combines a U-Net based architecture with a vision transformer. We apply ViTO to solve inverse PDE problems of increasing complexity, namely for the wave equation, the Navier-Stokes equations and the Darcy equation. We focus on the more challenging case of super-resolution, where the input dataset for the inverse problem is at a significantly coarser resolution than the output. The results we obtain are comparable or exceed the leading operator network benchmarks in terms of accuracy. Furthermore, ViTO`s architecture has a small number of trainable parameters (less than 10% of the leading competitor), resulting in a performance speed-up of over 5x when averaged over the various test cases.
FD-Net with Auxiliary Time Steps: Fast Prediction of PDEs using Hessian-Free Trust-Region Methods
Discovering the underlying physical behavior of complex systems is a crucial, but less well-understood topic in many engineering disciplines. This study proposes a finite-difference inspired convolutional neural network framework to learn hidden partial differential equations from given data and iteratively estimate future dynamical behavior. The methodology designs the filter sizes such that they mimic the finite difference between the neighboring points. By learning the governing equation, the network predicts the future evolution of the solution by using only a few trainable parameters. In this paper, we provide numerical results to compare the efficiency of the second-order Trust-Region Conjugate Gradient (TRCG) method with the first-order ADAM optimizer.
