Neural Harmonic Measure Operator
Organizations: Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract
We introduce Neural Harmonic Measure Operator (NHMO), a neural solver for elliptic PDE problems on variable-shape domains. The harmonic measure of a domain is the boundary probability distribution that, integrated against any boundary data, returns the Dirichlet Laplace solution. It depends only on the geometry, not on the boundary data. NHMO parameterizes the density of this measure as a transformer-based boundary kernel supervised by Walk-on-Spheres exit samples, so one trained kernel handles different boundary values on a shape with no retraining. We extend it to Poisson via a classical decomposition, with an auxiliary network amortizing the source-induced correction and avoiding the singular volume quadrature that breaks direct evaluation. At inference, new boundary values and new sources both yield PDE solutions by re-integration against the fitted kernel and lift, with no retraining. NHMO improves over four prior baselines on the MCB-B 3D variable-shape Poisson benchmark across all five categories, and is competitive with major neural-operator baselines on a controlled 2D testbed.
Figures & tables
| test (in-dist) | test_ood | |||||
| Method | median / mean | p95 | median / mean | p95 | OOD/test | per-problem |
| Transolver ( Wu et al., 2024 ) | / | / | ms | |||
| LNO ( Wang and Wang, 2024 ) | / | — | / | ms | ||
| UPT ( Alkin et al., 2024 ) | / | — | / | — | ms | |
| BENO ( Wang et al., 2024 ) | / | / | — | |||
| NGF ( Yoo et al., 2025 ) (2D port) | / | / | ms | |||
| Method | Nut | Gear | Motor | Fitting | Screws & Bolts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transolver ( Wu et al., 2024 ) | 0.320 | 0.281 | 0.407 | 0.180 | 0.221 |
| LNO ( Wang and Wang, 2024 ) | 0.372 | 0.466 | 0.528 | 0.259 | 0.239 |
| UPT ( Alkin et al., 2024 ) | 0.516 | 0.507 | 0.765 | 0.392 | 0.358 |
| NGF ( Yoo et al., 2025 ) | 0.275 | 0.243 | 0.338 | 0.160 | 0.189 |
| Ours (NHMO) | 0.216 | 0.188 | 0.284 | 0.147 | 0.131 |
| Mean | Median | p95 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nut | 0.216 | 0.215 | 0.329 |
| Gear | 0.188 | 0.144 | 0.378 |
| Motor | 0.284 | 0.265 | 0.450 |
| Fitting | 0.147 | 0.111 | 0.309 |
| Screws | 0.131 | 0.103 | 0.315 |
| Geometry step (per shape) | Per problem | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Setting | NHMO | baselines | NHMO | baselines |
| 2D MNIST ( ) | s | grid input | ms | – ms |
| 3D Nut | s | s (tet meshing) | ms | s (NGF) |
| 3D Motor | s | s (tet meshing) | ms | s / ms (NGF) |
Appendix figures & tables20 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Geometry | |
| bounded Lipschitz domain in dimension | |
| boundary of | |
| interior points | |
| boundary point | |
| outward unit normal to at | |
| 2D MNIST | 3D MCB-B | |
|---|---|---|
| (normalized domain) | ||
| step cap | ||
| walks per probe | (precomputed) | fresh exits per step (online) |
| probes | per shape | per gradient step |
| target | KDE, of domain width, nodes | exit-point likelihood |
| masked | – (by category) |
| Nut | Gear | Motor | Fitting | Screws | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| walks per second | |||||
| mean steps per walk | |||||
| masked fraction |
| shape | Ours | GF style | ratio | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| armadillo | 0.011 | 0.117 | ||
| armadillo | 0.011 | 0.103 | ||
| bunny | 0.019 | 0.249 | ||
| bunny | 0.016 | 0.214 | ||
| fandisk | 0.011 | 0.142 | ||
| fandisk | 0.012 | 0.138 |
| drift | boundary | Ours | GF style |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.060 | 0.366 | ||
| 0.062 | 0.280 | ||
| 0.062 | 0.378 | ||
| 0.065 | 0.326 | ||
| 0.069 | 0.364 | ||
| 0.061 | 0.293 |
| test mean / median | test p95 / max | OOD mean / median | OOD p95 / max | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| initial | / | — | / | — |
| aligned (40 epochs) | / | / | / | / |
| Track | Method | Nut | Gear | Motor | Fitting | Screws | Macro |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Poisson-OOD | NGF (released) | 0.678 | 0.605 | 0.616 | 0.627 | 0.548 | 0.615 |
| Ours | 0.382 | 0.099 | 0.347 | 0.211 | 0.274 | 0.263 | |
| Laplace-OOD | NGF (released) | 0.633 | 0.604 | 0.631 | 0.637 | 0.603 | 0.621 |
| Ours | 0.127 | 0.037 | 0.162 | 0.070 | 0.101 | 0.099 |
| Variant | head inputs | test | test_ood |
|---|---|---|---|
| kernel only | — | / | / |
| + source lift | , SDF, | / | / |
| + residual head | , , | / | / |
| main model: single lift | , , , | / | / |
| Variant | test (in-dist) | test_ood | OOD/test |
|---|---|---|---|
| -only (no ) | / | / | |
| M lift (canonical) | / | / | |
| M lift (capacity scan, A2) | / | / |
| (fraction of domain width) | -only test median |
|---|---|
| (sharper) | |
| (canonical) | |
| (smoother) |
| Train shapes | -only test median | lift test median |
|---|---|---|
| — | ||
| (canonical) |
| median | mean | p | |
|---|---|---|---|
| (canonical) | |||
| Digit class | test mean | test_ood mean | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 50 | ||
| 1 | 30 | ||
| 2 | 40 | ||
| 3 | 36 | ||
| 4 | 38 | ||
| 5 | 46 |
| Shape encoder | test (in-dist) | test_ood | OOD/test |
|---|---|---|---|
| Point-cloud (canonical) | / | / | |
| D SDF-CNN ( ) | / | / |