DFSC: Error-Controlled Differentiable Mittag-Leffler Propagation for Fractional Scientific Machine Learning

Many real-world processes exhibit long-range dependence, where the current state depends on a slowly decaying trace of past states rather than on the most recent state alone. This paper studies system identification for discrete-time fractional-order linear time-invariant systems from a single observed trajectory of length $t$, a setting that captures such non-Markovian dynamics through the Grünwald--Letnikov difference operator. Unlike Markovian systems, fractional-order systems couple estimation across the entire history, making both statistical analysis and practical identification more challenging. We propose \emph{Fractional-Order Ordinary-Least-Squares Grid-Search (FO-GS)}, a simple two-stage estimator that exploits the diagonal structure of the fractional-difference operator to decouple the identification problem row-wise. Under the stability assumption, we establish high-probability, non-asymptotic error bounds for estimating both the fractional order and the system matrix in the heterogeneous setting, with both estimation errors scaling as $\mathcal{O}(t^{-1/2})$. Through experiments, we show that \emph{FO-GS} outperforms existing baselines in recovering both the fractional order and the underlying system dynamics.

We develop the fTNN, a deterministic tensor neural network subspace method for problems involving the fractional Laplacian on bounded domains, taking the fractional Poisson equation and time-dependent fractional advection-diffusion equation as typical representatives. The work employs a geometry-adapted integration split featuring a spatially dependent near-field radius, which decomposes the fractional Laplacian into three contributions: a singular near field, a regular interior far field, and an analytical exterior far field. Then the singular radial integrals are treated by Gauss-Jacobi quadrature, the regular radial integrals by Gauss quadrature, and the angular variables by deterministic angular quadrature, yielding a fully deterministic integration framework of the fractional Laplacian operator. To accurately resolve low-regularity solutions and the associated loss functional, we construct boundary-singularity-aware trial functions enriched with explicit boundary features, and propose two strategies for automatically selecting the leading exponent and evaluating the loss function from the singularity structure induced by the fractional operator, or jointly by the fractional operator and the source term. For time-dependent fractional PDEs, we design a spatiotemporally separable neural network that factorizes the time-space residual into a sum of low-dimensional temporal and spatial integrals, and we integrate this representation with an alternating neural network subspace optimization strategy for efficient training. Numerical experiments show that the proposed framework attains high accuracy on the tested benchmarks and improves substantially over existing fPINN and Monte Carlo baselines, particularly for problems with strong boundary singularities and long-time simulations.

Fractional partial differential equations describe nonlocal dynamics, but discovering them from noisy data is difficult because fractional differentiation amplifies high-frequency measurement noise and the derivative orders are unknown. We propose Weak-Pareto, which combines an adjoint-consistent weak formulation of fractional terms with Pareto-based subset selection over discrete term types and continuous fractional orders. For linear right-hand-side terms, the adjoint transfers fractional operators from measured fields to smooth test functions, replacing noise-sensitive pointwise differentiation with smoothing integration; for nonlinear terms, the noise-suppression effect is partial yet useful. Coefficients are fitted by ridge regression within a branch-aware differential-evolution search over the orders. The support size is then selected at the validation-error-complexity elbow. We show that the variance of fixed linear right-hand-side weak features vanishes under grid refinement, whereas noise amplification in pointwise fractional features increases with derivative order. Across fractional advection-diffusion, reaction-diffusion, and Burgers benchmarks, Weak-Pareto recovers parsimonious structures from clean and noisy measurements. In controlled advection-diffusion and Burgers comparisons, it retains the correct support at every tested multiplicative-noise level, whereas the unregularised strong-form counterpart largely fails once noise is introduced; this advantage persists under additive Gaussian noise. Ablations show that the weak library drives noise robustness and that continuous-order Pareto search avoids the support-selection failure of a dense fixed dictionary. On the advection-diffusion benchmark, Weak-Pareto yields more consistent operator recovery and substantially lower measured runtime than a contemporary neural baseline.