SMORE: Stability-Promoting Mesh-Agnostic Model Reduction for Time-Dependent PDEs
Organizations: Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 110 8th Street, Troy, NY 12180, USA
Abstract
High-fidelity simulations of time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) are computationally expensive, motivating data-driven reduced-order surrogates for many-query tasks such as uncertainty quantification, design optimization, data assimilation, and optimal control. However, existing surrogate models often exhibit poor temporal stability, which can lead to unstable rollouts and exploding gradients during backpropagation, especially in multistep long-horizon forecasting. To address this, we propose SMORE, a mesh-agnostic framework for model order reduction of time-dependent PDEs. Its latent dynamics are trained with Lyapunov-guided stability regularization, which promotes stable long-horizon rollouts. We provide theoretical guarantees under the stated structural assumptions. Beyond forecasting PDE evolution, the learned latent dynamics, which are interpretable and linear or linear-quadratic, could bring benefits for downstream tasks such as data assimilation and optimal control. Moreover, our framework is capable of predicting continuous PDE solution fields from sparse measurements of the initial condition. We evaluate SMORE on a range of problems, including wave propagation, the Navier-Stokes equations, and the shallow water equations. Our results show that it improves long-horizon rollout generalization and empirical robustness, and achieves competitive accuracy at comparable parameter budgets relative to competitive baselines including DINo, FNO, CNO, and Transolver.
Figures & tables
| Dataset | Prediction target | Grid | Seq. length | Train seq. | Test seq. | |
| 2D Wave | two-component wave field | s | 20 | 512 | 32 | |
| 2D Navier–Stokes | vorticity | s | 20 | 512 | 32 | |
| 3D Spherical Shallow Water | height, vorticity | h | 20 | 64 | 16 |
| Model | Wave In-horizon | Wave Extrapolation | Navier–Stokes In-horizon | Navier–Stokes Extrapolation | Shallow Water In-horizon | Shallow Water Extrapolation |
| FNO [ 19 , 73 ] | 2.89e-04 | 7.37e-02 | 1.61e-03 | 2.43e-03 | 1.79e-03 | 5.22e-03 |
| CNO [ 20 ] | 1.99e-02 | 1.53e-01 | 1.52e-03 | 3.87e-03 | 8.03e-04 | 2.86e-03 |
| Transolver [ 25 ] | 7.82e-04 | 1.67e-02 | 4.13e-01 | 6.22e-01 | 1.71e-03 | 6.05e-03 |
| DINo [ 32 ] | 1.13e-03 | 1.38e-02 | 1.34e-03 | 2.32e-03 | 4.90e-04 | 6.49e-04 |
| SMORE-Koopman | 6.74e-05 | 3.22e-04 | 5.37e-02 | 9.78e-02 | 2.22e-04 | 5.34e-04 |
| SMORE-LRLQ | 1.25e-03 | 8.65e-04 | 1.01e-03 | 2.00e-03 | 5.86e-04 | 7.67e-04 |
| Dataset | FULL | FULL without | FULL without | FULL without |
| Navier–Stokes | 2.337e-3 | 3.475e-3 (+48.7%) | 2.796e-3 (+19.7%) | 5.191e-3 (+122.2%) |
| Shallow Water | 6.299e-4 | 6.403e-4 (+1.7%) | 6.342e-4 (+0.7%) | 5.585e-3 † (+786.8%) |
| Dataset (model) | ||||||
| Wave (SMORE-Koopman) | 2.01e-04 | 2.05e-04 | 1.98e-04 | 2.11e-04 | 6.96e-04 | 4.06e-02 |
| Navier–Stokes (SMORE-LRLQ) | 1.53e-03 | 1.53e-03 | 1.60e-03 | 1.78e-03 | 3.77e-03 | 2.48e-02 |
| Shallow Water (SMORE-Koopman) | 3.86e-04 | 3.94e-04 | 4.55e-04 | 6.71e-04 | 1.32e-03 | 1.56e-03 |
| Model | Spatial execution | Parameters | Maximum successful grid | Grid points | Relative points |
| Transolver [ 25 ] | Full grid | 358,007 | 4,096 | ||
| DINo [ 32 ] | Full grid | 356,444 | 26,569 | ||
| FNO [ 19 , 73 ] | Full grid | 336,653 | 73,441 | ||
| CNO [ 20 ] | Full grid | 326,184 | 94,249 | ||
| SMORE-Koopman | PM64 | 355,165 | 2,937,796 | ||
| SMORE-LRLQ | PM64 | 353,961 | 2,937,796 |
| Metric | Full-grid decoding | PM64 |
| Recorded peak allocated memory (MB) | 18,613.9 | 314.6 |
| Time for 5,000 epochs | 1 h 8 min 21 s | 4 h 4 min 32 s |
| In-horizon MSE ( ) | ||
| Extrapolation MSE ( ) | ||
| Overall MSE ( ) |
Appendix figures & tables10 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Baseline models | |||||||
| Dataset | Model | Architecture | |||||
| wa | FNO | ||||||
| CNO | |||||||
| Transolver | |||||||
| ns | FNO | ||||||
| CNO | |||||||
| Dataset | Model | Parameters | In-horizon loss | Extrapolation loss |
| Wave | FNO | 117,356 | ||
| Wave | CNO | 111,996 | ||
| Wave | Transolver | 128,328 | ||
| Wave | DINo | 126,928 | ||
| Wave | SMORE-Koopman | 128,045 | ||
| Wave | SMORE-LRLQ | 127,265 |
| Configuration | |||
| OFF | 8111 | 200 | 100 |
| only | Not observed | 147 | 142 |
| only | 8100 | 227 | 135 |
| only | Not observed | 150 | 146 |
| clip only | 7162 | 158 | 100 |
| low-rank only | Not observed | Not observed | Not observed |
| Configuration | |||||
| OFF | 3.139e-2 | 4.432e-3 | 1.966e-3 | 3.226e-3 | 7.215e-3 |
| only | 3.137e-2 | 4.496e-3 | 2.921e-3 | 4.141e-3 | 6.708e-3 |
| only | 3.139e-2 | 4.506e-3 | 1.959e-3 | 3.351e-3 | 5.102e-3 |
| only | 3.137e-2 | 4.536e-3 | 2.845e-3 | 4.097e-3 | 7.018e-3 |
| clip only | 3.087e-2 | 4.441e-3 | 1.939e-3 | 2.295e-3 | 4.532e-3 |
| low-rank only | 3.960e-2 | 5.335e-3 | 2.635e-3 | 2.887e-3 | 4.161e-3 |
| Configuration | |||
| OFF | 0.8614 † | 2.360 † | 4.069 † |
| only | 0.8574 | 2.757 † | 3.397 † |
| only | 0.8603 † | 2.699 † | 3.427 † |
| only | 0.8464 | 2.953 † | 3.240 † |
| clip only | 0.8843 † | 2.669 † | 5.313 † |
| low-rank only | 0.9120 | 0.7832 | 0.7305 |
| Visible ratio | Wave (SMORE-Koopman) | Navier–Stokes (SMORE-LRLQ) | Shallow Water (SMORE-Koopman) |
| 2.01e-04 9.84e-05 | 1.53e-03 1.01e-04 | 3.86e-04 8.58e-06 | |
| 2.05e-04 1.04e-04 | 1.53e-03 1.09e-04 | 3.94e-04 8.03e-06 | |
| 2.12e-04 1.05e-04 | 1.56e-03 1.06e-04 | 4.06e-04 2.01e-06 | |
| 2.12e-04 1.09e-04 | 1.57e-03 9.51e-05 | 4.17e-04 2.38e-06 | |
| 2.01e-04 8.59e-05 | 1.59e-03 1.03e-04 | 4.30e-04 4.23e-06 | |
| 1.98e-04 8.39e-05 | 1.60e-03 1.03e-04 | 4.55e-04 3.97e-06 |
| Visible ratio | Wave (SMORE-Koopman, ) | Navier–Stokes (SMORE-LRLQ, ) | Shallow Water (SMORE-Koopman, ) |
PDE Surrogate Modeling
PDE surrogate modeling builds fast approximations of partial differential equation solutions for simulation, prediction, and design.
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