Operator Learning for Smoothing and Forecasting

Many systems resist analytical modeling, making data-driven inference of dynamics important. Yet data-driven methods can fail to converge or generalize, leaving open a central question: When can system behavior be learned reliably from data, and when is such learning impossible? We answer this question using adversarial dynamical systems to identify the boundary between accessible and inaccessible regimes. In Koopman operator learning, a leading framework for representing nonlinear dynamics through linear spectral objects, we design optimal data-driven spectral algorithms with convergence and certification guarantees under conditions arising broadly in physical systems. This yields a convergence theory for Koopman-operator approximations and resolves a longstanding open problem in Koopman spectral analysis. Conversely, by constructing adversarial systems, we prove matching impossibility results: without these conditions, no single-sequence limiting procedure can guarantee learning, regardless of data quality. These results sharply characterize when data-driven spectral learning can succeed and when it must fail. We validate the framework on oscillators, chaotic fluid flows and Arctic sea ice concentration forecasting. In the latter, we uncover hidden modes of Arctic sea ice decline, deliver long-range forecasts with geographic error bounds, and outperform state-of-the-art dynamical and deep learning models at substantially lower computational cost, enabling real-time deployment on standard CPUs.

We introduce a score-filter-enhanced data assimilation framework designed to reduce predictive uncertainty in machine learning (ML) models for data-driven dynamical system forecasting. Machine learning serves as an efficient numerical model for predicting dynamical systems. However, even with sufficient data, model uncertainty remains and accumulates over time, causing the long-term performance of ML models to deteriorate. To overcome this difficulty, we integrate data assimilation techniques into the training process to iteratively refine the model predictions by incorporating observational information. Specifically, we apply the Ensemble Score Filter (EnSF), a generative AI-based training-free diffusion model approach, for solving the data assimilation problem in high-dimensional nonlinear complex systems. This leads to a hybrid data assimilation-training framework that combines ML with EnSF to improve long-term predictive performance. We shall demonstrate that EnSF-enhanced ML can effectively reduce predictive uncertainty in ML-based Lorenz-96 system prediction and the Korteweg-De Vries (KdV) equation prediction.

Many physical data assimilation (DA) workflows require smoothing methods that represent non-Gaussian posteriors over physical state variables, scale to high-dimensional simulators, train from observation windows alone, and remain compatible with calibration of the prescribed simulator. We introduce PR-Smoother, a simulator-preserving amortized smoother designed for this prescribed-simulator DA regime. Its key design principle is to keep the prescribed simulator explicit in both the evidence lower bound and the variational family: rather than learning replacement dynamics or a learned trajectory prior, PR-Smoother learns only future-conditioned corrections around the prescribed rollout. This yields an explicit non-Gaussian smoothing distribution over physical trajectories and supports joint state, parameter, and sensor-bias learning from observations alone. The variational family contains the exact smoother in deterministic and linear-Gaussian limits. Empirically, PR-Smoother captures multimodal posteriors in 4-dimensional Lorenz-96, remains accurate under ambiguous nonlinear observations and process noise in 40-dimensional Lorenz-96, and scales to joint state-parameter-bias inference in 16,384-dimensional Kolmogorov flow.