Euclidean Fourier Neural Operators
Organizations: Mathematics for Materials Modelling (MatMat), Institute of Mathematics & Institute of Materials, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
Abstract
Fourier neural operators (FNOs) provide an efficient framework for learning mappings between function spaces as they are, by construction, independent of the grid resolution at which they are trained and evaluated. However, FNOs are not independent of the periodic domain they are applied to: their discrete spectral weights are indexed by integer Fourier mode numbers, which correspond to physical wavevectors. When applied to a different domain, the same trained weights act at different wavevectors, and the FNO silently represents a different operator. This makes FNOs unsuitable for tasks where transfer across domains is crucial. We propose Euclidean Fourier neural operators~(EFNOs) as a domain-independent alternative to FNOs. By parameterizing the spectral kernel as a continuous function of the physical wavevector, the EFNO can learn operators that act consistently across periodic domains of varying shape and size. We evaluate the EFNO on a simple heat equation and on a practically relevant materials science task of learning exchange-correlation potentials across different crystal structures, and demonstrate that the EFNO is able to generalize to unseen grid sizes and domains.
Figures & tables
| Diamond | Water | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Train | Test | Train | Test |
| PBE | 826.67 | 825.17 | 1350.33 | 1348.37 |
| FNO | 81.96 | 1815.42 | 108.03 | 1675.35 |
| EFNO | 47.88 | 56.11 | 57.95 | 103.54 |
Appendix figures & tables5 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Method | Spectral weight | Kernel argument |
|---|---|---|
| FNO [ Li et al., 2021 ] | lookup table | mode number |
| AM-FNO [ Xiao et al., 2024 ] | learned function | mode number |
| SirenFNO [ Shi et al., 2026 ] | learned function | mode number |
| PDNO [ Shin et al., 2024 ] | learned function | mode number & position |
| KANO [ Lee et al., 2026 ] | learned function | mode number & position |
| EFNO (ours) | learned function | physical wavevector |
| Real-space kernel | Spectral kernel |
|---|---|
| Real-valuedness | Hermitian symmetry |
| real-valued | |
| Smoothness | Decay at large |
| has derivatives in | |
| Range | Smoothness of |
| supported in | entire, |
| Single cell | supercell | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Fitting | Rectangular | |||||
| FNO | |||||||
| EFNO | |||||||
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