Lossy Compression of PDE Training Inputs: Field Reconstruction Error Does Not Order the Cost to a Trained Operator
Organizations: Powermore Ltd., Da Nang, Vietnam
Abstract
Operator-learning benchmarks are stored at full precision and have grown to terabyte scale. Rate-distortion theory says how many bits the stored field needs, while a practitioner needs to know how accurate an operator trained on the compressed data will be. We show that the first does not determine the second, and measure why, compressing the input fields while targets and test inputs stay at full precision. A solution operator attenuates a perturbation of its input. Pushing a compressed field through a surrogate already trained at full precision measures how much of the perturbation that surrogate transmits. The fraction is consistent with the smoothing behaviour of the underlying equation, and it spans more than two orders of magnitude across PDE families. Field reconstruction error is computed before the attenuation and cannot see it. For operators trained with mean squared error it inverts 36 of 104 cost comparisons across datasets, where a probe built from the same forward passes inverts 12. Two families that PDEBench stores with identical initial conditions differ threefold downstream at identical field error. Under the relative-L2 objective of the reference recipe the separation narrows, while the ordering of the family-level median transmission factors is unchanged. After one full-precision training run, the probe evaluates an entire rate curve by forward passes alone. It ranks datasets and rates consistently across the codecs and architectures we test, while its magnitude does not transfer between them.
Figures & tables
| family | field error | fp32 error | cost | seeds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| advection | ||||
| Burgers | ||||
| reaction–diffusion |
| family | / field error | the solution operator approximated |
|---|---|---|
| advection | to | a shift, transmits everything |
| Burgers | to | nonlinear, transmits most |
| shallow water 2D | to | hyperbolic with a source |
| Darcy 2D | to | elliptic solve, smooths hard |
| reaction–diffusion | to | close to a projection |
| reaction–diffusion, far | to | the strongest projection here |
| family | dim | fp32 error | compression | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Burgers | 1 | bpv | ||
| Darcy | 2 | bpv | ||
| reaction–diffusion | 1 | bpv | ||
| advection | 1 | bpv | none at |
Appendix figures & tables25 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| family | samples | side info | stored rate at the lowest trained rate | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1D families | bits | against nominal, | ||
| Darcy 2D | bits | against , | ||
| shallow water 2D | bits | against , |
| family | rate (bpv) | field error | measured cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| advection | |||
| reaction–diffusion | |||
| advection | |||
| reaction–diffusion | |||
| Burgers | |||
| Darcy 2D |
| family pair | point pairs | field error inverts | the probe inverts |
|---|---|---|---|
| advection shallow water | |||
| Burgers Darcy 2D | |||
| reaction–diffusion far | |||
| advection far | |||
| reaction–diffusion shallow water | |||
| advection reaction–diffusion |
| predictor | within a family | across families | worst magnitude | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| field reconstruction error | of | of | — | |
| of | of | |||
| alone, no codec information | of | of | — | |
| transmitted error alone | of | of | — | |
| the probe, | of | of |
| families | pairs | field error inverts | the probe inverts | blocks lost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| all six | ( ) | ( ) | vs of | |
| without advection | ( ) | ( ) | vs of | |
| without Burgers | ( ) | ( ) | vs of | |
| without reaction–diffusion | ( ) | ( ) | vs of | |
| without Darcy 2D | ( ) | ( ) | vs of | |
| without shallow water | ( ) | ( ) | vs of |
| objective | field error | the probe | blocks lost | order | worst |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| mean squared error | of | of | vs | — | |
| relative , normalised targets | of | of | vs | ||
| relative , physical field | of | of | vs |
| family | mean squared error | relative , normalised | relative , physical |
|---|---|---|---|
| advection | |||
| Burgers | |||
| reaction–diffusion | |||
| Darcy 2D | |||
| shallow water 2D | |||
| reaction–diffusion, far |
| family | rate | field error | cost, MSE | normalised | physical | probe |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| advection | ||||||
| advection | ||||||
| Burgers | ||||||
| Burgers | ||||||
| reaction–diffusion | ||||||
| reaction–diffusion |
| family | dim | eff. rank in | out | contraction | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| advection | 1 | ||||||
| Burgers | 1 | ||||||
| reaction–diffusion | 1 | ||||||
| Darcy | 2 |
| family | fp32 error (%) | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| advection | ||||
| Burgers | ||||
| reaction–diffusion | ||||
| Darcy |
| family | arm | rate (bpv) | field error | probe | measured | ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| our transform codec, for reference | ||||||
| advection | transform | |||||
| reaction–diffusion | transform | |||||
| SZ3, an error-bounded compressor | ||||||
| advection | target | |||||
| advection | target | |||||
| family | probe | trained fit | ratio | the check |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Burgers | bpv costs , consistent | |||
| reaction–diffusion | bpv, below it, costs : conservative | |||
| Darcy 2D | — | — | bpv costs , outside | |
| shallow water 2D | extrapolated, directional only | |||
| reaction–diffusion, far | bpv costs , outside | |||
| advection | — | — | and bpv cost and , consistent |
| family | arm | rate | field error | cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| advection | water-filling | bpv | ||
| advection | best low-pass | bpv | ||
| advection | SZ3, whole ensemble | bpv | ||
| advection | SZ3, per sample, at its floor | bpv | ||
| advection | ZFP, per sample, at its floor | bpv | ||
| reaction–diffusion | best low-pass | bpv |
| family | budget | best point | its error | whole pool | gain |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| advection | bpv | at bpv | |||
| advection | bpv | at bpv | |||
| reaction–diffusion | bpv | at bpv | |||
| reaction–diffusion | bpv | at bpv |
| bar | required | would have failed at | outcome |
| geometric mean, out of sample | any worse | MISSED , | |
| probe inside SZ3 | any worse | MISSED , | |
| probe inside a wavelet, worst | any worse | MISSED , | |
| probe inside a wavelet, median | any worse | MISSED , | |
| 2D Fourier operator under-predicts | of | of | MISSED , of |
| worst case, sixth family | any worse | MISSED , |
| predictor | in-sample (8) | out-of-sample (8) | mean , out of sample |
|---|---|---|---|
| forward-pass probe | |||
| -epoch fine-tune | |||
| geometric mean of the two |