Physics-Informed Reduced-Order Operator Learning for Hyperelasticity in Continuum Micromechanics

We propose a Weak-form Physics-Informed Neural Operator (WINO), a data-free framework that combines the efficiency of neural operators with the geometric flexibility of the $\varphi$-finite element method ($\varphi$-FEM). $\varphi$-FEM is an unfitted method that accommodates geometric variations without body-fitted meshes, where the domain geometry is represented by the level-set function $\varphi$. To impose the boundary conditions, Dirichlet problems adopt the $\varphi$-FEM lifting so only the homogeneous displacement contribution is learned, whereas traction-driven Neumann problems additionally predict the auxiliary fields necessary for the unfitted weak formulation. Parameters are trained by minimizing squared weak-form residuals aligned with $\varphi$-FEM together with squared penalties on the cut-cell auxiliary equations, which removes the need for large paired datasets of converged reference solutions. After training, WINO outputs can seed the nonlinear $\varphi$-FEM solvers as neural operator warm starts (NOWS), which reduce iteration counts relative to traditional cold-started solvers. Numerical benchmarks show that WINO achieves high accuracy below 0.04 across all benchmarks, while reducing total computational time by 50--80% compared with purely data-driven methods.

Reconstructing local stress fields in heterogeneous microstructures under non-linear, history-dependent loading remains a major computational bottleneck in multi-scale simulations. We propose a coupled LSTM-GNN framework that links the temporal and spatial aspects of local stress field reconstruction. A Long Short-Term Memory network encodes macroscopic stress-strain sequences into a compact hidden state that captures the path-dependent constitutive response, while a physics-informed Graph Neural Network reconstructs the spatially-resolved stress field at each time step. We introduce a relative weighting strategy with linear warm-up to balance the data-driven reconstruction loss and a discrete divergence-based equilibrium penalty. This resolves the scale mismatch that prevents fixed-weight formulations from converging in the elasto-plastic regime. The model is trained on 10,000 non-proportional loading paths applied to a periodic plate-with-a-hole microstructure and von Mises elasto-plasticity. The model achieves three orders of magnitude speedup over finite element simulations and generalizes to loading sequences twice the training length, with 1.9% cumulative error. Because the graph relies on mesh connectivity instead of the specific element type, one trained surrogate can be applied directly without retraining to meshes with different element types and to both coarser and finer resolutions, while in all cases reproducing the high-fidelity quad-element FE field used during training. Indeed, the message passing characteristics inherent to GNN and MeshGraphNet architecture render the model mesh-agnostic. Analysis of the LSTM hidden states suggests a low-dimensional structure related to the internal state variables of the constitutive model.

We present a novel formulation for mesh-free, reduced-order simulation of deformable hyperelastic objects. Existing work in reduced-order elastodynamic simulation represents the input geometry by either meshes, which can be difficult to obtain due to challenges in scanning and triangulating complex shapes, or by neural fields that require per-shape optimization. We propose to adopt a Reproducing Kernel Particle Method (RKPM) representation, which enables the construction of reduced-order skinning weights by solving a generalized eigensystem on the Hessian matrix of the elastic energy. We demonstrate that this formulation not only leads to a 40x training speedup compared with the per-shape optimization of neural fields, but also achieves lower simulation error when evaluated against the converged results of finite element method. We show our simulation results on a wide variety of objects in different representations including meshes and Gaussian splats, as well as the application of our method in the downstream task of robot simulation.