Forecasting the long-horizon evolution of mechanical systems from position-only observations is a pivotal yet difficult task, as hidden velocities and trajectory-specific physical properties must be inferred simultaneously. Although physics-guided neural networks like Lagrangian Neural Networks (LNNs) guarantee physical plausibility, they generally require complete state inputs and lack adaptability to changing system parameters. To break these limitations, we introduce History-informed Lagrangian Neural Networks (HiLNN). Grounded in the insight that temporal position sequences implicitly encode underlying dynamics, HiLNN employs a recurrent encoder to extract a latent context from history. This context not only reconstructs the unobserved initial velocity but also adaptively modulates the mass matrix, potential energy, and damping coefficients of a structured Lagrangian system. By leveraging a differentiable RK4 rollout scheme, the entire pipeline is optimized end-to-end under multi-step trajectory supervision and energy-consistency regularization. Empirical evaluations across conservative, dissipative, and heterogeneous variable-parameter systems show that HiLNN delivers superior long-term prediction accuracy and maintains precise energy profiles compared to state-of-the-art baselines. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/yingtian22/History-informed-LNN.
Structure-preserving neural networks are essential for the long-term prediction of Hamiltonian systems from data. Many important Hamiltonian systems in mechanics and control admit symmetry reduction to Lie--Poisson systems, including rigid bodies, underwater vehicles, fluids, plasmas, and optimal control problems. A fundamental challenge in learning such systems is that their dynamics evolve in momentum variables that are typically unobservable, while available data consist only of observable quantities such as configurations and velocities. In optimal control applications, the situation is further complicated because the latent variables contain unobservable co-states and the Hamiltonian may be degenerate, preventing the existence of a corresponding Lagrangian and rendering the encoder-decoder approaches inapplicable. We introduce Latent Lie--Poisson Neural Networks (LLPNNs), a structure-preserving framework for learning Lie--Poisson dynamics directly from observable data. The proposed approach exploits three geometric ingredients: (i) learning either a Hamiltonian decoder or a pseudo-Lagrangian encoder on the active variables, (ii) constructing latent trajectories through a universal Noether invariant arising from Lie--Poisson symmetry reduction, and (iii) reconstructing observable and latent dynamics through Lie--Poisson flows combined with Magnus-based Lie-group updates. The resulting method preserves the geometric structure and is applicable to both regular and degenerate Hamiltonian systems. We demonstrate the method on three examples: a generalized rigid body on SO(3), Kirchhoff's underwater vehicle on SE(3), and an optimal-control problem for interacting vehicles on SE(2)N. Numerical experiments show excellent long-term predictive accuracy, strong robustness to noise, and competitive performance using only modest datasets and lightweight neural-network architectures.
When learning dynamical systems from data, embedding physical structure can constrain the solution space and improve generalization, but many physics-informed models assume access to the full system state. This limits their use in partially observed settings, where some state variables are completely unobserved and must be inferred without direct supervision. Here, we present neural Hamiltonian ordinary differential equations (NHODE), a framework that combines Hamiltonian neural networks (HNNs) with neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs) to learn partially observed dynamical systems from data. The Hamiltonian structure enforces energy conservation by construction, while the neural ODE framework enables a flexible training procedure that allows the loss to be defined only on observed variables. We also incorporate additional physical constraints through symmetry-aware coordinate transformations and separable energy formulations. The framework is evaluated on systems of increasing complexity, from linear and nonlinear mass-spring systems to the chaotic three-body problem. Across all examples, increasing the amount of embedded physical structure improves the accuracy and long-horizon stability of the predictions. Even in the most challenging regimes, the NHODE framework captures both observed and latent dynamics, whereas purely data-driven baselines become unstable.
Sunniva Meltzer, Sølve Eidnes, Alexander Johannes Stasik
Long-horizon forecasting of time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) is critical for characterizing the sustained evolution of physical systems. While neural operators have emerged as efficient surrogates, they typically learn implicit finite-time transitions from discrete observations. When deployed autoregressively, such propagators often suffer from rapid error accumulation and dynamic drift. To address this, we propose a neural forecasting framework that reformulates PDE rollout as learning a Structured Spectral Propagator (SSP) in a propagation-oriented latent space. Following an analysis-propagation-synthesis design, our framework: (i) maps physical states into a shared, time-consistent spatial representation; (ii) projects this space into a compact propagation state to isolate recurrent dynamics from fine-grained spatial details, thereby decoupling reconstruction fidelity from rollout regularity; and (iii) evolves retained spectral modes using a frequency-conditioned linear backbone complemented by a nonlinear spectral closure to account for truncated interactions. This explicit structuring endows the propagator with a strong inductive bias for coherent modal evolution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SSP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing relative L2 errors by up to 48.9% and exhibiting improved stability in temporal extrapolation beyond the supervised horizon.