PDE-JEPA: Predictive Representation Learning of Latent Dynamics Modeling for Parametric PDEs
Organizations: Zhejiang University.
Abstract
Physical trajectories contain more than snapshots of a system: they also reveal how its states evolve under governing conditions. However, representation learning for parametric partial differential equations (PDEs) has largely relied on reconstruction-based objectives that emphasize recovering observed physical fields. In this paper, we investigate predictive representation pretraining as an alternative to reconstruction-based learning. We find that predictive representations preserve rich physical information, yet this advantage alone does not ensure accurate field evolution. Based on these observations, we introduce PDE-JEPA for parametric PDE dynamics. Specifically, we first train an encoder using a masked-latent prediction to capture the underlying regularities of PDE dynamics. To explicitly adapt the pretrained representation toward a more dynamics-aligned state space, we then introduce a geometry projector that aligns latent trajectory geometry with the evolution geometry of physical fields. Finally, building on this geometry-aligned latent space, we further develop a physics-structured latent predictor that decomposes the dynamics into parameter-independent evolution and parameter-dependent response components. Extensive experiments on nine widely used PDE benchmarks demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by an average of 33.4% in-distribution, while achieving an average improvement of 51.4% when extrapolating to unseen governing parameters. The project page is available here.
Figures & tables
| Method | Advect | Burgers | Heat | Wave-B | Combined | Wave-2D | Vorticity | HeterNS | GS |
| Parametric Solvers | |||||||||
| FNO | 0.0390 | 0.4972 | 0.3449 | 0.9819 | 0.0374 | 0.9913 | 0.1411 | 0.0210 | 0.0547 |
| CAPE | 0.0094 | 0.2230 | 0.2130 | 0.9780 | 0.0085 | – | – | – | – |
| CoDA | 0.0068 | 0.5460 | 0.7670 | 1.0200 | 0.0120 | 0.7770 | 0.6780 | – | – |
| GEPS | 0.0930 | 0.3989 | 0.6641 | 0.6317 | 0.0097 | 0.5138 | 0.0821 | 0.1032 | 0.0332 |
| In-Context Solvers | |||||||||
| Vorticity | Wave-2D | |||
| Model | ID | OOD | ID | OOD |
| Vanilla | .086 | .491 | .363 | .502 |
| + PAG | .040 | .397 | .143 | .321 |
| + PSP | .034 | .288 | .114 | .157 |
| Vorticity | Wave-2D | |||
| Model | ID | OOD | ID | OOD |
| Vanilla | .086 | .491 | .363 | .502 |
| + PAG | .040 | .397 | .143 | .321 |
| + PSP | .034 | .288 | .114 | .157 |
| Dataset | Angle MAE ( ∘ ) | Sym. Acc. MAE | Lag-1 Cos. MAE |
| Vorticity | (-78%) | (-77%) | (-84%) |
| Wave-2D | (-71%) | (-68%) | (-74%) |
| Burgers | (-49%) | (-49%) | (-59%) |
| GS | (-29%) | (-30%) | (-32%) |
| Method | Combined | Wave-2D | Vorticity | HeterNS Visc./Force | GS |
| UniSolver | 0.038 | 1.003 | 0.923 | 0.037 / 0.105 | 0.1636 |
| Poseidon-T | 0.146 | 1.511 | 0.665 | 0.560/0.821 | 0.083 |
| LNS | 0.1667 | 0.610 | 0.481 | 0.610/0.932 | 0.146 |
| ENMA | 0.243 | 1.151 | 0.467 | 1.501/2.271 | 0.134 |
| Zebra | – | 0.680 | 0.320 | – | – |
| Ours | 0.008 | 0.157 | 0.288 | 0.011 / 0.103 | 0.033 |
| Field | Latent | ||||
| Dataset | Model | Cos. | Amp. | Cos. | Amp. |
| Vorticity | PAG | .626 | .846 | .913 | 1.142 |
| + PSP | .708 | .987 | .924 | 1.043 | |
| Wave-2D | PAG | .958 | .979 | .939 | .990 |
| + PSP | .986 | .996 | .947 | 1.002 | |
Appendix figures & tables11 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Dataset | Shape per trajectory | Train | Val. | Test | OOD |
| Advection | 12,000 | 120 | 120 | – | |
| Burgers | 12,000 | 120 | 120 | – | |
| Heat | 12,000 | 120 | 120 | – | |
| Wave-B | 12,000 | 120 | 120 | – | |
| Combined Equation | 12,000 | 120 | 120 | 120 | |
| Vorticity | 12,000 | 1,200 | 1,200 | 120 |
| Dataset | Parameter | In-D | Out-D |
| Combined | |||
| same as In-D | |||
| same as In-D | |||
| Vorticity | |||
| HeterNS | |||