Learning PDE Dynamics between Submanifolds Using Green's Observation Operators
Authors: Jan Tauberschmidt, Jephte Abijuru, Samuel Okon, Naukshatro Bose, Sophie Fellenz, Marius Kloft, Jonas Latz, Sebastian Josef Vollmer
Organizations: German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Kaiserslautern, Germany · Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität (RPTU), Kaiserslautern, Germany · University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom
Many physical systems are driven and observed only on lower-dimensional submanifolds of a larger spatial domain, while their dynamics are governed by the ambient medium occupying that domain. Examples include laser-heated parts imaged by an infrared camera, and ground-level emissions measured on a sensor plane. Full-domain solvers, however, compute the entire volume for every new source although only the observation submanifold is needed, and black-box surrogates do not exploit that the ambient medium remains fixed. We introduce the \emph{Green's Observation Operator (GObO)}, which maps the ambient medium once to the Green's kernel of a linear PDE restricted to the source and observation submanifolds. New sources then cost one lower-dimensional integral and no network evaluation. Exponential rates in the kernel yield an exact finite streaming state with horizon-independent memory; we prove its stability and an approximation rate for the restricted heat kernel. On three-dimensional heat conduction and advection--diffusion with collocated and distinct source and observation geometries, GObO trained on static sources predicts responses to moving sources zero-shot with 4--8× lower error than black-box surrogates, at 1.4,ms per query after a single conditioning pass. The same kernel transfers across resolutions and admits corrections for mild nonlinearities, including radiative losses and temperature-dependent conductivity, without retraining, at the cost of lower in-distribution accuracy.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: A laser acts on a source submanifold and drives an observed temperature response on the observation submanifold. The ambient medium affects the temperature flux. Classical PDE solvers model the transport through the full volume, whereas our GObO directly models the map between source and observation submanifolds.
Ours
Finite-volume solver
Time for 1000 source predictions/solves
1.7 s
1.3 h
Table 1: Classical solvers repeat a volumetric solve for every source although only the lower-dimensional trace is required, making repeated prediction expensive. See details in Section 5.5 .
system
method
static
moving
heat
GObO
0.011±0.001
0.012±0.000
adapted NGO, S=1
0.039±0.001
0.043±0.000
medium-conditioned FNO-2D
0.001±0.000
0.101±0.004
advection–diffusion
GObO, fixed rates
0.114±0.018
0.101±0.020
medium-conditioned FNO-2D
0.104±0.009
0.430±0.015
Table 2: GObO transfers to unseen source configurations. All models are trained on static sources and evaluated on static and moving sources without retraining. Shown is the mean relative error and standard deviation.
Figure 2: GObO tracks the moving response, whereas FNO does not track it accurately. Left: true final temperature and source trajectory. Middle: temperature profiles at the three indicated times. Right: position and magnitude of the temperature peak.
Figure 3: The restricted observation requires additional state information for recurrent prediction. (a) Next-step regression error with increasing observation history, compared with a closed two-dimensional heat system. (b) Rollout error of GObO and transient NGO with spectral cap S . (c) History dependence of the purely spatial one-step GObO variant.
method
frequency
CPU
GPU, b=1
FV solver, matched accuracy
per source
4.6 s
n/a
FNO-2D forward
per source
194.1 ms
2.50 ms
GObO conditioning
per medium
218.3 ms
10.1 ms
GObO query
per source
1.45 ms
0.45 ms
Table 3: GObO constructs one kernel per medium and then evaluates new sources faster than FNO-2D or the numerical solver.
Appendix figures & tables38 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
pointwise kernel values
reusable representation
steady
GreenLearning, MOD-Net, BI-GreenNet, and GreensONet ( Boullé et al., 2022a ; Zhang et al., 2022 ; Lin et al., 2023 ; Gu et al., 2025 )
discrete and spectral Green representations ( Tang et al., 2022 ; Praveen et al., 2025 ; Yoo et al., 2026 ; Yang et al., 2026 )
transient
GreenONet ( Aldirany et al., 2024 )
full-kernel identification ( Boullé et al., 2022b ) , one-step NGO, DGNet, and GObO
Appendix
Table 4: Representative learned Green-function methods. Pointwise methods query individual kernel values. Reusable methods produce a finite operator representation that is applied without another network query at each point.
quantity
value
spatial grid
643 cells
time interval
[0,1]
stored frames
Nt=64
time integrator
Crank–Nicolson
substeps per frame
4 for linear, 32 for radiative, adaptive for configuration B
linear solver
preconditioned conjugate gradients
Appendix
Table 5: Reference discretization for the heat data.
medium
construction
two-phase
Threshold gmed at its median. Set αsolid=5×10−4 and αpowder=5×10−6 . The top 2 cell layers are set to αpowder .
graded
Set φ=Φ(gmed/std(gmed)) and α=αpowder+(αsolid−αpowder)φ . For the interior-plane data, the endpoints are 10−4 and 10−2 and no powder cap is used.
Appendix
Table 6: Media used in the heat experiments. The collocated experiments use the two-phase medium. The interior-plane experiments use the graded medium.
data set
samples
heat training
1024
static test
128
straight scans
128
serpentine scans
128
radiative test
128
Kirchhoff data
1024/128/128 per setting
Appendix
Table 7: Heat data used for training and evaluation. Multiple numbers denote training, static test, and the moving or shifted test sets.
observation
grid location
relation to the source
horizontal plane
iz=48
separated by about LΩ/4
vertical plane
ix=32
mid-plane whose top edge lies in the source face
Appendix
Table 8: Interior observation surfaces. Both cases are covered by Proposition 2 . The horizontal case also satisfies the uniform bound in Remark 1 .
data set
samples
training
1024
static test
128
straight moving source
128
complex moving source
128
Appendix
Table 9: Advection–diffusion data used for training and evaluation.
quantity
setting
retained modes
32×32 in each chart
source and observation dimensions
DS=DO=1024
temporal rates
R=16
factor rank per rate
L=16
hidden width
64
conditioning blocks
4 cosine spectral blocks with U-Nets and 1 truncated layer
Appendix
Table 10: Settings for the heat GObO used in the main experiments.
Figure 4: Conditioning architectures. The adapted NGO system network maps medium projections to a dense coefficient matrix. GObO maps the medium volume to low-rank factors for each analytic decay rate. The GObO source is applied only after these factors have been produced.
quantity
setting
loss
relative L2 in equation 108
optimizer
AdamW with default moment parameters
learning rate
10−3
weight decay
10−4
schedule
cosine decay to zero
training steps
30,000
Appendix
Table 11: Shared training settings. FNO-3D uses batch size 8. The interior-plane models use the changes described below.
quantity
value
diffusivity
κ=1
time step and frames
Δt=0.0125 and Nt=64
first supervised frame
4 , corresponding to τmin=0.05
chart grid
64×64 cell-centered points
retained chart modes
16×16 cosine modes
ambient spectral cutoff
nj≤6 , giving 343 modes
Appendix
Table 12: Settings for the controlled curved-manifold example.
quantity
setting
CPU
AMD EPYC 7742 with 32 allocated cores
GPU
NVIDIA A100-SXM4 with 80 GB
software
Python 3.12.3 and PyTorch 2.13
numerical libraries
NumPy 2.1.0 and SciPy 1.17.1 with OpenBLAS
solver repetitions
1 warmup and 3 measurements
learned-model repetitions
3 warmups and 8 measurements
Appendix
Table 13: Environment used for the timing measurements.
mode
computation
M0
Compare the 2 numerical reference solutions.
M1
Run the complete learned model on the fine grid.
M2
Run the learned model on the coarse grid and evaluate its final continuous spectral representation on the fine grid.
M3
Run only the GObO medium encoder on the coarse grid, then project the fine-grid source and evaluate the operator on the fine grid.
Appendix
Table 14: Resolution-transfer modes used in Section F.5.2 .
setting
βumax
conductivity ratio
mild
0.2
1.2
strong
0.5
1.5
severe
1.0
2.0
Appendix
Table 15: Conductivity contrasts used in the nonlinear experiments. The range covers reported process windows for 316L, IN718, and Ti-6Al-4V ( Kim, 1975 ; Alloys, 2008 ; Mukherjee et al., 2016 ) .
model
parameters
scope
GObO
22.16 M
heat, fixed rates
FNO-2D
16.91 M
heat
matched spectral model
17.89 M
heat
FNO-3D
67.18 M
heat
advection GObO, fixed rates
44.01 M
advection–diffusion
advection GObO, learned rates
44.14 M
advection–diffusion
Appendix
Table 16: Model sizes. Fixed-rate and learned-rate advection models are listed separately.
relative L2
absolute L2
method
static
straight
serpentine
static
straight
serpentine
GObO
0.011±0.001
0.012±0.000
0.005±0.000
2838±160
2253±85
2447±12
FNO-2D
0.001±0.000
0.101±0.004
0.137±0.007
282±17
23330±810
63590±3400
FNO-3D
0.004±0.000
0.185±0.003
0.426±0.008
970±6
46670±360
199500±3900
matched spectral model
0.003±0.001
0.204±0.002
0.217±0.004
370±50
48130±700
100800±1900
Appendix
Table 17: Complete source-transfer comparison. Values are means and population standard deviations over 3 seeds. The moving sets are zero-shot.
Figure 5: Per-frame behavior on serpentine scans. GObO tracks the moving peak throughout the trajectory, whereas FNO-2D develops a persistent displacement error. Curves show the 3-seed min–max band.
baseline architecture
static
straight
serpentine
FNO-2D, 4 layers
0.001±0.000
0.101±0.004
0.137±0.007
FNO-2D, 5 layers
0.001±0.000
0.103±0.002
0.149±0.005
matched spectral model, 4 layers
0.003±0.001
0.204±0.002
0.217±0.004
matched spectral model, 5 layers
0.004±0.001
0.226±0.002
0.234±0.013
Appendix
Table 18: Baseline-depth ablation (relative L2 ). Increasing depth does not resolve the moving-source failure of either direct-output architecture.
GObO factorization
static
straight
serpentine
fixed rates, shared factors, L=16
0.011±0.001
0.012±0.000
0.005±0.000
learned rates, shared factors, L=16
0.011±0.002
0.012±0.002
0.006±0.001
fixed rates, separate factors, L=16
0.019±0.001
0.016±0.001
0.008±0.000
learned rates, separate factors, L=16
0.013±0.002
0.013±0.002
0.006±0.001
fixed rates, shared factors, L=1
0.130±0.007
0.123±0.005
0.074±0.008
Appendix
Table 19: Rate and factor-structure ablation. Here L is the factor search rank used for each fixed or learned rate, matching the terminology of Tables 26 and 26 .
observation
method
static
straight
serpentine
horizontal plane
GObO
0.042
0.044
0.027
horizontal plane
FNO-2D
0.027
0.194
0.108
vertical mid-plane
GObO
0.064
0.062
0.054
vertical mid-plane
FNO-2D
0.066
0.240
0.148
Appendix
Table 20: Source transfer with non-collocated observations. The horizontal plane is separated from the source by LΩ/4 , the vertical plane is orthogonal to the source face.
Figure 6: A moving source observed on the vertical mid-plane. For the displayed sample, GObO has relative error 0.033 and FNO-2D has 0.104 , the aggregate per-frame curves show that the gap persists over the test set.
relative L2
absolute L2
method
static
straight
complex
static
straight
complex
GObO, fixed rates
0.114±0.018
0.101±0.020
0.139±0.035
1.88±0.19
2.04±0.31
2.00±0.24
GObO, learned rates
0.300±0.021
0.313±0.016
0.352±0.028
5.19±0.19
6.68±0.23
6.13±0.26
FNO-2D
0.104±0.009
0.430±0.015
0.364±0.007
1.77±0.15
9.33±0.36
6.09±0.17
Appendix
Table 21: Complete source-generalization results on the sensor curtain. Values are means and population standard deviations over 3 seeds.
Figure 7: A moving ground-level release observed on a vertical sensor curtain. The qualitative comparison complements the aggregate advection–diffusion errors in Table 21 .
params
one-step (static)
rollout, static
straight
serpentine
rescaled fraction
ms/frame
GObO
22.16 M
–
0.011±0.001
0.012±0.000
0.005±0.000
–
0.13
A. NGO as published
NGO, S=0.8
0.02 M
0.163±0.000
0.721±0.000
0.760±0.000
0.552±0.001
1.00
0.09
NGO, S=1
0.02 M
0.012±0.000
0.039±0.001
0.043±0.000
0.027±0.001
1.00
0.09
B. One-step GObO variants
one-step, k=1
22.28 M
0.021±0.000
0.103±0.003
0.103±0.009
0.058±0.003
1.00
0.08
Appendix
Table 22: One-step schemes on the trace. Relative error, mean ± population standard deviation over 3 seeds, 128 samples per set. “One-step” is the error of a single step from the true previous frames, the quantity these rows are trained on, the 3 rollout columns feed the model its own previous frames from rest. “Rescaled fraction” indicates whether the norm cap is active on the first static test sample, averaged over the 3 seeds. Frame-spacing transfer requires retraining for every one-step row. Parameter counts are of the built models.
cumulative error on
[0,1T]
[0,2T]
[0,3T]
[0,4T]
GObO
0.010±0.000
0.047±0.002
0.105±0.004
0.158±0.007
NGO, S=0.8
0.702±0.000
0.812±0.000
0.832±0.000
0.841±0.000
NGO, S=1
0.036±0.001
0.142±0.001
0.237±0.001
0.297±0.001
one-step, k=1
0.099±0.001
0.227±0.005
0.326±0.008
0.396±0.012
one-step, k=4
0.090±0.012
diverged
diverged
diverged
one-step, k=16
0.030±0.006
0.136±0.022
0.58±0.20
diverged
Appendix
Table 23: One-step schemes, horizon. Cumulative relative error on the first h⋅64 frames of the decaying-source test set (128 samples, source off before T ), mean ± population standard deviation over 3 seeds. GObO by the streaming recurrence, the one-step rows by rollout. “Diverged” is a rollout that has left the scale of the data by that horizon (a cumulative error above 1 in at least 1 seed). The S=0.8 row has decayed to a fraction of the truth instead.
Figure 8: Impulse-response comparison. The panels show the response produced by the proposed kernel parametrization and by the naive separable space–time alternative.
params
static
straight
serpentine
Δ/2
Δ (control)
2Δ
GObO ( e−λk(t−s) , 16 rates)
22.16 M
0.011±0.001
0.012±0.000
0.005±0.000
0.010±0.000
0.011±0.000
0.011±0.000
separable space–time kernel, C=16
22.67 M
0.035±0.001
0.045±0.002
0.051±0.008
0.031±0.001
0.031±0.001
0.033±0.001
Appendix
Table 24: Separable space–time basis. Relative error equation 108 , mean ± population standard deviation over 3 seeds, 128 samples per set. The last 3 columns use the same independently generated frame-spacing test set.
params
static
straight
serpentine
Δ/2
Δ (control)
2Δ
ms/frame
GObO (cosine spectral conditioning)
22.16 M
0.011±0.001
0.012±0.000
0.005±0.000
0.010±0.000
0.011±0.000
0.011±0.000
0.13
medium projections + U-Net
22.73 M
0.103±0.012
0.102±0.011
0.068±0.011
0.110±0.013
0.110±0.013
0.111±0.013
0.14
Appendix
Table 25: Medium pathway. Relative error, mean ± population standard deviation over 3 seeds, 128 samples per set. Columns as in Table 24 , ms/frame is measured per streaming step.
Figure 9: Kernel recovery on distinct curved manifolds. The source lies on a saddle and the response is observed on a separate curved surface. The final panels compare the reference and recovered restricted kernel at τ=0.05 .
search rank L
objective
recovered rank
coefficient error
coefficient optimum
1.804×10−4
7
n/a
1
2.593×10−3
1
0.986
2
8.714×10−4
2
0.730
4
2.563×10−4
4
0.380
8
1.826×10−4
7
0.215
16
1.788×10−4
7
0.160
Appendix
Table 26: Complete search-rank sweep. Recovered rank uses the threshold 10−4σ1 , coefficient error is ∥A−Acvx∥F/∥Acvx∥F . The objective reaches its elbow at L=8 , and L=16 is used in the heat experiments. At L=256 , the additional singular values lie at the reporting threshold, making the rank count threshold-sensitive.
operation
frequency
CPU
GPU b=1
GPU b=64 /sample
FV assembly and preconditioner
per medium
0.6 s
n/a
n/a
FV production trajectory
per source
63.5 s
n/a
n/a
FV matched-accuracy trajectory
per source
4.6 s
n/a
n/a
FNO-2D forward pass
per source
194.1 ms
2.50 ms
0.38 ms
GObO conditioning
per medium
218.3 ms
10.1 ms
4.29 ms
GObO batch response
per source
1.45 ms
0.45 ms
0.008 ms
Appendix
Table 27: Operation-level timing. A batch of 64 sources shares one conditioned GObO, the finite-volume solver was evaluated on CPU only.
method
time
memory
finite-volume solver
O(NtnsubICGN3logN)
O(N3)
FNO-2D
O(PN2(C2+ClogN))
O(N2C)
GObO conditioning
O(N3)
operator factors
GObO batch
O(Nt[N2logN+RL(DS+DO)]+Nt2RL)
O(NtN2+Nt2R)
GObO streaming
O(Nt[N2logN+RL(DS+DO)])
O(N2+RL)
Appendix
Table 28: Implemented asymptotic costs. Streaming removes the quadratic dependence on history length.
mode
GObO
FNO-2D
M0. compare truths at 64 and 128
0.026
M1. end-to-end at 128
0.078±0.022
0.044±0.002
M2. coarse compute, fine readout
0.025±0.000
0.059±0.000
M3. condition at 64, operator at 128
0.025±0.000
n/a
Appendix
Table 29: Resolution transfer 64→128 (relative L2 against truth at 128, 3 seeds, 64 paired samples). M2 and M3 reach the discretization floor, M3 is structurally unavailable to FNO.
Figure 10: Resolution-transfer paths. The source enters FNO before its learned layers, so there is no FNO analogue of the GObO-only M3 path.
M1 positional encoding
GObO
FNO-2D
raw cell-index features
0.292±0.056
0.047±0.001
continuous reference features
0.078±0.022
0.044±0.002
Appendix
Table 30: Positional-encoding ablation for end-to-end fine evaluation. M2 and M3 do not run the encoder on the fine grid and are unaffected by this choice.
Figure 11: Radiative feedback with the original linear checkpoint. (a) Peak surface temperature over time, the shaded band between the unchanged linear kernel and the truth is the heat that radiation removes. (b) Temperature at t=T along the hottest row. The unchanged kernel overshoots the peak, whereas the streamed semi-implicit correction captures both saturation and the final profile without retraining.
mild 0.2
strong 0.5
severe 1.0
method
retraining
static
shifted
static
shifted
static
shifted
Configuration A. exact Kirchhoff transform
FNO trained for each setting
6
0.001
0.104
0.001
0.116
0.001
0.103
linear FNO + transform
0
0.001
0.096
0.002
0.107
0.002
0.099
GObO, no correction
0
0.053
0.069
0.122
0.151
0.232
0.263
GObO + exact transform
0
0.011
0.009
0.010
0.009
0.010
0.009
Appendix
Table 31: Temperature-dependent conduction without retraining. Relative errors are means over 3 seeds. Every standard deviation is at most 0.002 for the GObO rows and at most 0.007 for the retrained FNO. Shifted sources include scans, rasters, and sums of 2 pulses.
Figure 12: 2 nonlinear material laws corrected with 1 linear checkpoint. Surface temperature along the hottest row at t=T for the severe-contrast tier ( kmax/kmin=2 ), 1 static test sample per configuration. Each panel overlays the truth, the uncorrected GObO prediction, and the corrected prediction. Panel (a) uses the exact Kirchhoff transform and panel (b) uses the trace-based state update. Both panels share axes, line styles, and temperature scale. Table 31 quantifies the contrast trends.
model
residual/state
steps
mild static
mild shifted
strong static
strong shifted
FNO trained for setting
n/a
0
0.001
0.101
0.001
0.104
linear FNO + iteration
time derivative
≤20
0.011(2)
0.097(29)
0.026(6)
0.093(26)
linear GObO + iteration
time derivative
≤20
0.011(3)
0.009(2)
0.015(3)
0.014(3)
linear GObO + iteration
generator
≤20
0.011(3)
0.009(2)
0.016(4)
0.014(3)
GObO + trace-based update
generator state
1
0.014
0.012
0.021
0.019
FV solver + iteration
time derivative
≤20
0.002(1)
n/a
0.007(3)
n/a
Appendix
Table 32: Fixed-point attribution for configuration B. Entries are median relative errors over non-diverged samples, parentheses give half the interquartile range in units of the last digit.