cs.LGOct 5, 2026

OCL-PDE: A Generative Framework for PDE Inverse Problems with Observation-Complementary Latents

Authors: Ding Yang, Chuqi Chen, Chang Ma, Yang Xiang

Organizations: Department of Mathematics, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong · Department of Mathematics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA · Department of Materials, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong · Algorithms of Machine Learning and Autonomous Driving Research Lab, HKUST Shenzhen-Hong Kong Collaborative Innovation Research Institute, Shenzhen, China

Abstract

Partial differential equation (PDE) inverse problems are often ill-posed, making fine-scale details difficult to recover. We address this problem by introducing a learned observation-complementary latent representation that preserves reconstruction-relevant information and is combined with the observation to reconstruct the unknown field. Building on this representation, we propose OCL-PDE, a generative framework that encourages the observation to guide large-scale structure and the latent to supply complementary fine-scale details. OCL-PDE is built on a physics-aware autoencoder (AE) and conditional Flow Matching, supporting inverse reconstruction as well as forward PDE prediction. Experiments demonstrate improved reconstruction accuracy and fine-detail recovery compared with the evaluated baselines.

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