COSMOS: Soft Mechanism Mixtures with Verifiable Routing for Long-Horizon PDE Forecasting

Solutions to many partial differential equations (PDEs) display coexisting smooth global transport and localized sharp features within a single trajectory: shock fronts, thin interfaces, and concentrated high-frequency content sit on top of slowly varying backgrounds. This poses a challenge for neural operators: Fourier-based architectures mix nonlocal interactions efficiently but tend to under-resolve localized non-smooth features, whereas spatially local architectures recover fine detail at the cost of long-range propagation and rollout stability. Existing hybrid operators paper over this tension with a fixed, spatially uniform fusion that forces the same trade-off everywhere. We propose U-HNO, a U-shaped hybrid neural operator whose central design is Sparse-Point Adaptive Routing (SPAR): at every spatial location, a per-pixel hard mask selects whether the global Fourier branch or the local multi-scale Gaussian branch should dominate, and the sparsity ratio is a function of the local contrast of the routing signal, so smooth and shock-aligned regions receive different mixtures of global and local computation. SPAR is embedded in a hierarchical encoder-bottleneck-decoder backbone with skip connections so that the dual branches and the gate operate at every resolution. Training combines pointwise supervision with a finite-difference H^1 gradient term and a band-wise spectral consistency regularizer. Across benchmarks spanning 1D Burgers, Kuramoto-Sivashinsky, KdV, 2D advection, Allen-Cahn, Navier-Stokes, Darcy flow, and 3D transonic compressible Navier-Stokes from PDEBench, U-HNO achieves state-of-the-art rollout accuracy on the majority of tasks in both relative L^2 and H^1 metrics, with the largest gains on problems dominated by sharp localized features. Ablations show that removing any single component substantially degrades rollout error.

We identify a mismatch between the physical role of transport fields in many PDEs and their usual role in neural operators: PDEs use them to select read coordinates, whereas neural operators typically treat them only as input values. We address this mismatch with the Green-Routed Neural Operator (GRNO), which uses the governing equation to determine where latent features are sampled. A parameter-free equation adapter evaluates the diagnostic relation and constructs a departure map whose values are the read coordinates. A multiscale encoder-decoder combines centered and routed reads of latent features to learn the complete finite-time update. Across five two- and three-dimensional PDE systems, GRNO achieves the lowest mean final relative $L^2$ error on four under 40-step autoregressive evaluation and remains competitive on Keller-Segel. Fixed-weight route interventions reveal strong dependence on direction and spatial alignment in four systems, with weak dependence in Keller-Segel. In independently trained ablations, GRNO achieves lower mean errors than variants that supply the transport field only as an input feature, substitute a learned displacement for the equation-specified route, or apply the route with a spatial misalignment, across all five systems. It also substantially outperforms directly advecting the physical state and learning the remaining update, indicating that equation-specified read coordinates provide an effective structural prior for long-horizon PDE forecasting.

Neural operators have emerged as promising surrogate models for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), but struggle to generalise beyond training distributions and are often constrained to a fixed temporal discretisation. This work introduces a physics-informed training framework that addresses these limitations by decomposing PDEs using operator splitting methods, training separate neural operators to learn individual non-linear physical operators while approximating linear operators with fixed finite-difference convolutions. This modular mixture-of-experts architecture enables generalisation to novel physical regimes by explicitly encoding the underlying operator structure. We formulate the modelling task as a neural ordinary differential equation (ODE) where these learned operators constitute the right-hand side, enabling continuous-in-time predictions through standard ODE solvers and implicitly enforcing PDE constraints. Demonstrated on incompressible and compressible Navier--Stokes equations, our approach achieves better convergence and superior performance when generalising to unseen physics. The method remains parameter-efficient, enabling temporal extrapolation beyond training horizons, and provides interpretable components whose behaviour can be verified against known physics.