Organizations: University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China · Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
Long-term fluid dynamics forecasting is a critically important problem in science and engineering. While neural operators have emerged as a promising paradigm for modeling systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs), they often struggle with long-term stability and precision. We identify two fundamental failure modes in existing architectures: (1) local detail blurring, where fine-scale structures such as vortex cores and sharp gradients are progressively smoothed, and (2) global trend deviation, where the overall motion trajectory drifts from the ground truth during extended rollouts. We argue that these failures arise because existing neural operators treat local and global information processing uniformly, despite their inherently different evolution characteristics in physical systems. To bridge this gap, we propose the Dual-Scale Neural Operator (DSO), which explicitly decouples information processing into two complementary modules: depthwise separable convolutions for fine-grained local feature extraction and an MLP-Mixer for long-range global aggregation. Through numerical experiments on vortex dynamics, we demonstrate that nearby perturbations primarily affect local vortex structure while distant perturbations influence global motion trends, providing empirical validation for our design choice. Extensive experiments on turbulent flow benchmarks show that DSO achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while maintaining robust long-term stability, reducing prediction error by over 88% compared to existing neural operators.
Figures & tables
Figure 1
Figure 2. Temporal evolution of vortex dipole under close (top) vs. far (bottom) perturbations. The curve represents a streamline of the flow field. The red-blue vortex pair on the left represents the dipole, while the isolated vortex on the right is the perturbing vortex.
Metric
Close ( d=0.6 )
Far ( d=2.5 )
Local gradient change Δmax(∥∇ω∥)
+45%
− 29%
Global position shift ∥Δxc∥
0.8
0.6
Table 1. Comparison of effects for perturbations.
Figure 3. Overview of DSO architecture. The model consists of three components: (1) an encoder E that extracts multi-scale spatial features, (2) a translator T composed of stacked dual-pathway blocks, and (3) a decoder D that reconstructs the predicted field. Each block contains a Local Pathway (convolution) for fine-scale features and a Global Pathway (MLP-Mixer) for domain-wide information aggregation. The curved arrows connecting the encoder and decoder represent skip connections.
Method
NS-Forced
NS-Decaying
All-step
1-step
10-step
19-step
All-step
1-step
50-step
99-step
DSO
0.0153
0.0001
0.0015
0.1086
0.1714
0.0003
0.1271
0.4986
UNO
0.2752
0.0037
0.0974
1.1894
nan
0.1771
nan
nan
CNO
0.3790
0.0008
0.1116
1.6521
4.5553
0.0390
5.2277
6.2792
FNO
0.0263
0.0001
0.0024
0.1852
1.6333
0.0242
1.7299
2.9465
U_Net
0.1278
0.0007
0.0308
0.6620
2.9288
0.0177
3.3029
4.6783
Table 2. MSE comparison across methods for NS-Forced and NS-Decaying turbulence. “All-step” denotes the average error over all prediction steps, while “ i -step” indicates the error at the i -th specific prediction step. Lower MSE values indicate better performance, while "nan" indicates excessive model error or data overflow, suggesting model collapse.
Figure 4. We selected predictions from selected models on the NS-Decaying dataset, computed and analyzed the mean and variance of their SSIM values.
Method
All-step
1-step
50-step
99-step
DSO
0.1714
0.0003
0.1271
0.4986
w/o Conv
0.2059
0.0004
0.1565
0.5871
w/o MLP-Mixer
1.1335
0.0010
1.1330
2.4606
Table 3. Ablation study of DSO on the NS-Decaying dataset
Figure 5. Comparison of gradient and divergence errors of different methods on the NS-Decaying dataset. (a) Gradient magnitude error quantifies the accuracy of capturing flow deformation features. (b) Divergence error measures physical consistency and mass conservation properties.
Figure 6. Prediction visualization of selected models across various time steps for the NS-Decaying case, where the top row displays the ground truth values.
Appendix figures & tables5 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Metric
Close ( d=0.6 )
Far ( d=2.5 )
Local gradient change Δ∥∇ω∥max
+45%
− 29%
Global position shift ∥Δxc∥
0.8
0.6
Appendix
Table 4. Comparison of local and global effects for close vs. far perturbations.
Model Name
Parameter
Value(s)
DSO
Input Shape
[1,1,64,64]
Encode Hidden Dim
128
Translator Hidden Dim
256
Encode Layers
4
Translator Layers
8
UNO
in_width
5
Appendix
Table 5. Model Parameters Configuration of NS-Forced
Model Name
Parameter
Value(s)
DSO
Input Shape
[1,1,128,128]
Encode Hidden Dim
128
Translator Hidden Dim
256
Encode Layers
4
Translator Layers
8
UNO
in_width
5
Appendix
Table 6. Model Parameters Configuration of NS-Decaying
Figure 7. Prediction visualization of selected models across various time steps for the NS-Forced case, where the top row displays the ground truth values.
Figure 8. Prediction visualization of selected models across various time steps for the NS-Decaying case, where the top row displays the ground truth values.
Neural operators have emerged as powerful surrogates for dynamical systems due to their grid-invariant properties and computational efficiency. However, Fourier-based variants inherently truncate high-frequency components in spectral space, resulting in the loss of small-scale structures and degraded prediction quality at high resolutions when trained on low-resolution data. While diffusion-based enhancement methods can recover multi-scale features, they introduce substantial inference overhead that undermines the efficiency advantage of neural operators. In this work, we introduce MeanFlow-Enhanced Neural Operators (MENO), a novel framework that achieves accurate all-scale predictions with minimal inference cost. By leveraging the improved MeanFlow method, MENO restores both small-scale details and large-scale dynamics with superior physical fidelity and statistical accuracy. We evaluate MENO on three challenging dynamical systems, including phase-field dynamics, 2D Kolmogorov flow, and active matter dynamics, at resolutions up to 256×256. Across all benchmarks, MENO improves the power spectrum density accuracy by up to a factor of 2 compared to baseline neural operators while achieving up to 14× faster inference than the state-of-the-art Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM)-enhanced counterparts, effectively bridging the gap between accuracy and efficiency. The flexibility and efficiency of MENO position it as an efficient surrogate model for scientific machine learning applications where both statistical integrity and computational efficiency are paramount.
Tianyue Yang, Xiao Xue
Centre for Computational Science, University College London, London, United Kingdom
We study data-driven prediction of coarse-grained dynamics in multiscale PDE systems. Adopting a closure-free operator-learning viewpoint, we apply a linear coarse-graining map and learn a surrogate evolution operator for the resolved field directly from filtered high-fidelity trajectories. Motivated by the Mori-Zwanzig formalism, we propose a spatiotemporal neural operator mapping a resolved history slab on Ω×[−Tin,0] to a resolved future slab on Ω×[0,Tout]. Spatial mixing uses Fourier convolution, while temporal mixing uses a causal kernel operator with position-attention weights on time lags. This causal temporal operator encodes finite-memory effects in the resolved dynamics while preserving the directionality of the history-to-future map. To improve rollout robustness and suppress nonconservative artifacts, we embed a flux-form inductive bias by parameterizing the windowed update in explicit divergence form. We also provide a data-driven guideline for selecting the memory length Tin via the decorrelation time of a closure-injection diagnostic computed from filtered trajectories. We validate on the coarse-grained viscous Burgers' equation, the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, and two-dimensional turbulent flows, obtaining stable autoregressive rollouts with improved long-horizon accuracy and statistical fidelity.
Junfeng Chen
Department of Mathematics, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China
Neural operators have shown strong potential for learning solution operators of partial differential equations (PDEs). However, long-horizon autoregressive prediction remains challenging: local errors accumulate as spectral inconsistency, phase misalignment, or mean drift. Existing methods mainly improve state representations and operator backbones, while leaving the repeatedly applied latent transition increment weakly structured, allowing spectral errors and unstable channel couplings to accumulate during rollout. To address these issues, we propose a geometry-aware incremental neural operator (GeoIncNO) for stable long-horizon PDE prediction. GeoIncNO predicts latent increments for residual advancement and uses lightweight low-rank projectors to regulate channel coupling within active frequency bands derived from the increment spectral energy distribution. To reduce physical-space reconstruction errors, GeoIncNO further introduces a mean--fluctuation decoupled reconstruction mechanism, where stable mean structures and dynamic fluctuations are fused separately, and phase correction is applied only to the zero-mean fluctuation component. Extensive experiments on six PDE benchmarks, covering 1D, 2D, and 3D dynamical systems, show that GeoIncNO achieves consistently strong prediction accuracy, improved rollout stability, and better spectral fidelity compared with competitive neural-operator baselines.
Jiaquan Zhang, Shuxu Chen, Haifan Meng +6
School of Information and Software Engineering, UESTC · Electronics and Information Convergence Engineering, KHU · School of Computer Science and Engineering, UESTC +4