Learning solution operators for partial differential equations (PDEs) requires models that can represent spatial structure across grids and scales. This becomes especially important in time-dependent problems, where the learned operator is often used autoregressively: each predicted state is fed back as input to predict future states. In this setting, small spatial errors can be repeatedly propagated through the learned dynamics, leading to instability and drift, vitiating long-term solution fidelity. We propose Mesh-Free Convolutions (MFCs), filters defined in continuous space and discretized only at evaluation time. This allows the same learned filters to be applied across resolutions. Rather than imposing a grid-dependent stencil or a fixed spectral cutoff, MFCs learn smooth scale-dependent filtering and include directional terms for transport-like behavior. Across fluid-dynamics and weather-forecasting benchmarks, MFC-based models produce stable long-horizon rollouts, transfer reliably across resolutions, and better preserve long-time statistics. These results suggest that continuous, mesh-free filtering is a useful inductive bias for PDE operator learning, especially in autoregressive prediction.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Autoregressive rollout on the PDEBench 1D advection benchmark [ 32 ] . Both FNOs are trained as one-step predictors and differ only in the number of retained Fourier modes. A small mode budget leads to phase drift, amplitude distortion, and oscillatory artifacts, while increasing the number of modes improves the final-state prediction.
Figure 2: Kernel family produced by the MFC parameterization. Varying τ controls scale (localized to diffuse); the diffusion-tensor entries set anisotropy and orientation; γx,γy introduce directional, derivative-like lobes; and the shift δ translates the kernel center. A compact parameter vector ξ thus spans smooth, anisotropic, and transport-like filters without hand-crafted stencils.
Dataset
PDE / Data
Resolution
Baselines
Evaluation focus
Navier–Stokes [ 12 ]
2D incomp
1282
FNO , F-FNO , UNet
Rollout stability
WeatherBench2 [ 29 ]
ERA5
64×32→240×121
AFNO, FNO
Long-time statistics
Burgers 2D [ 36 ]
2D Burgers
642→1282
FNO, F-FNO
Localized structures
Table 1: Summary of experimental benchmarks.
Figure 3: Autoregressive rollout on the 2D Navier–Stokes benchmark. MFC-UNet shows the slowest error growth and highest spatial correlation, while FNO becomes unstable and F-FNO loses correlation faster. At Δt=40 , the energy spectrum shows that MFC-UNet better preserves the ground-truth scale structure, whereas FNO develops high-wavenumber artifacts.
MFC-resnet
AFNO
FNO
Variable
Horizon T
σGT
RMSE
NRMSE (%)
RMSE
NRMSE (%)
RMSE
NRMSE (%)
U10 ( m/s )
100
3.509
0.569
16.2
0.572
16.3
8.227
234.5
300
3.514
0.836
23.8
1.134
32.3
10.159
289.1
500
3.525
1.029
29.2
1.422
40.3
10.075
285.8
V10 ( m/s )
100
1.703
0.388
22.8
0.412
24.2
3.679
216.0
300
1.708
0.512
30.0
0.856
50.1
5.292
309.9
Table 2: Latitude-weighted climatology error on WeatherBench2. NRMSE is RMSE normalized by the ground-truth spatial standard deviation, σGT , and reported as a percentage.
Ground truth
MFC-resnet
AFNO
MFC − GT
AFNO − GT
U10
V10
T850
Figure 4: WeatherBench2 500-step time-mean fields. Rows show U10 , V10 , and T850 . The first three columns show the ground truth, MFC-resnet, and AFNO time means with a shared color scale. The last two columns show the corresponding climatological biases, MFC−GT and AFNO−GT , with a separate shared bias scale.
MFC-resnet
AFNO
FNO
Variable
64×32
240×121
Ratio
64×32
240×121
Ratio
64×32
240×121
Ratio
U10 (m/s)
4.47
4.80
1.07
4.50
9.40
2.09
5.54
6.06
1.09
V10 (m/s)
4.66
4.93
1.06
4.71
6.06
1.29
5.53
5.60
1.01
T850 (K)
4.25
4.33
1.02
4.43
13.14
2.97
7.01
10.53
1.50
Table 3: Cross-resolution zero-shot transfer at step 50, reported as median RMSE over initial conditions. Models are trained at 64×32 and evaluated at both native and 240×121 resolution. The degradation ratio RMSE240×121/RMSE64×32 measures sensitivity to resolution change, while the absolute 240×121 RMSE is the main high-resolution accuracy metric.
GMean@20
GMean@50
GMean@100
Test
Res.
FNO
FFNO
MFC
FNO
FFNO
MFC
FNO
FFNO
MFC
A
642
0.4153
0.0135
0.0841
1381.5232
0.1969
0.6660
5.75×109
8.7762
1.7009
B
642
0.5353
0.0694
0.2183
1414.6782
0.3758
0.8718
4.97×109
9.7672
1.5673
C
1282
0.7712
0.2592
0.2681
2384.3485
1.2758
1.1350
9.20×109
44.6557
2.3423
D
1282
0.9035
0.3454
0.4090
2261.6899
1.2914
1.2314
7.15×109
39.7726
2.1275
Table 4: Aggregated rollout error on 2D Burgers across the four test sets. We report the geometric mean of normalized RMSE at 20, 50, and 100 autoregressive rollout steps [ 9 ] ; lower is better.
GMean@20
Variant
Modification
Val. rel. ℓ2
A
B
C
D
MFC-full (released)
—
0.0113
0.084
0.218
0.268
0.409
MFC-full (retrain)
—
0.0131
0.128
0.279
0.332
0.486
− shift
δ≡0
0.0144
0.214
0.304
0.359
0.461
− first-order
γx=γy≡0
0.0127
0.070
0.173
1.012
0.998
− anisotropy
αxy≡0
0.0166
0.115
0.253
1.017
0.970
Table 5: Component ablations on 2D Burgers. Validation relative ℓ2 is the 5-step unrolled average used for checkpoint selection. GMean@50/@100 and checkpoint provenance: Appendix D .
Appendix figures & tables12 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
GMean@20
GMean@50
GMean@100
Variant
A
B
C
D
A
B
C
D
A
B
C
D
MFC-full (released)
0.084
0.218
0.268
0.409
0.666
0.872
1.135
1.231
1.701
1.567
2.342
2.128
MFC-full (retrain)
0.128
0.279
0.332
0.486
0.621
0.806
1.133
1.195
0.972
0.998
1.359
1.287
− shift
0.214
0.304
0.359
0.461
0.834
0.852
1.075
1.086
1.512
1.266
1.833
1.623
− first-order
0.070
0.173
1.012
0.998
0.459
0.601
1.149
1.099
1.139
1.074
1.311
1.200
− anisotropy
0.115
0.253
1.017
0.970
0.764
0.934
1.618
1.433
1.933
1.705
2.228
1.847
Appendix
Table 6: Component ablations on 2D Burgers at all horizons (test sets A/B/C/D).
Figure 5: Learned MFC parameters: Burgers (left) and Navier–Stokes (right).
Figure 6: Spectral amplification on Burgers test A. Vertical line: FNO mode cutoff k=18 ; shaded: unresolved k>28 .
Figure 8: Qualitative autoregressive rollout comparison on the 2D Navier–Stokes benchmark. Columns show prediction horizons Δt∈{3,6,9,12} . For each model, the upper image in each cell is the predicted vorticity field and the lower image is the corresponding error map. MFC-UNet remains closer to the ground truth, while FNO and UNet accumulate larger errors over longer rollouts.
Figure 9: Representative U10 rollout at step 50. The initial condition is selected by the median-improvement criterion described above. MFC-parabolic remains closer to the ground truth at both resolutions, while FNO shows stronger distortion after rollout.
Figure 10: Representative V10 rollout at step 50. The initial condition is selected by the median-improvement criterion described above. MFC-parabolic better preserves the spatial structure across both the training and zero-shot resolutions.
Figure 11: Representative T850 rollout at step 50. The initial condition is selected by the median-improvement criterion described above. The gap between MFC-parabolic and FNO becomes more visible under zero-shot transfer.
Setting
Value
Resolution
128×128
Context frames
10
Prediction
Single-step teacher-forced
Optimizer
Adam
Learning rate
5×10−4
Scheduler
StepLR, step size 50 , γ=0.5
Appendix
Table 8: Training configuration for the Navier–Stokes Kolmogorov-flow experiment.
Setting
Value
Training resolution
64×32
Zero-shot test resolution
240×121
History frames
4
Prediction
Single-step
Optimizer
Adam
Learning rate
10−3
Appendix
Table 9: Training configuration for the WeatherBench2 experiment (ERA5; U10, V10, T850).
Setting
Value
Training resolution
64×64
Cross-resolution test
128×128
Context frames
5
Unroll steps (training)
5
Optimizer
Adam
Learning rate
5×10−4
Appendix
Table 10: Training configuration for the 2D Burgers experiment.
Mesh-free numerical methods provide flexible discretisations for complex geometries; however, classical meshless discrete differential operators typically trade low computational cost for limited accuracy or high accuracy for substantial per-stencil computation. We introduce a parametrised framework for learning mesh-free discrete differential operators using a graph neural network trained via polynomial moment constraints derived from truncated Taylor expansions. The model maps local stencils relative positions directly to discrete operator weights. The current work demonstrates that neural networks can learn classical polynomial consistency while retaining robustness to irregular neighbourhood geometry. The learned operators depend only on local geometry, are resolution-agnostic, and can be reused across particle configurations and governing equations. We evaluate the framework using standard numerical analysis diagnostics, showing improved accuracy over Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics, and a favourable accuracy-cost trade-off relative to a representative high-order consistent mesh-free method in the moderate-accuracy regime. Applicability is demonstrated by solving the weakly compressible Navier-Stokes equations using the learned operators.
Lucas Gerken Starepravo, Georgios Fourtakas, Steven Lind +3
School of Engineering, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK · School of Engineering, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Nonlocal partial differential equations arise in many applications but are often difficult to model and learn because of the presence of nonlocal operators. We present a flow-map learning (FML) framework for modeling unknown nonlocal PDEs directly from solution data. Rather than learning or approximating the underlying nonlocal operators, the proposed approach learns the finite-time evolution operator in either modal or nodal space. Two complementary formulations are developed for spectral and grid-based solution representations. Numerical experiments on one- and two-dimensional fractional diffusion and wave equations demonstrate accurate and stable long-time prediction using only short observation windows. The proposed approach provides an effective data-driven framework for learning unknown nonlocal dynamics without explicit evaluation of nonlocal operators.
Zhongshu Xu, Ying Li, Yanzhi Zhang +1
Department of Mathematics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA. · Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, MO 65409, USA.
We study data-driven prediction of coarse-grained dynamics in multiscale PDE systems. Adopting a closure-free operator-learning viewpoint, we apply a linear coarse-graining map and learn a surrogate evolution operator for the resolved field directly from filtered high-fidelity trajectories. Motivated by the Mori-Zwanzig formalism, we propose a spatiotemporal neural operator mapping a resolved history slab on Ω×[−Tin,0] to a resolved future slab on Ω×[0,Tout]. Spatial mixing uses Fourier convolution, while temporal mixing uses a causal kernel operator with position-attention weights on time lags. This causal temporal operator encodes finite-memory effects in the resolved dynamics while preserving the directionality of the history-to-future map. To improve rollout robustness and suppress nonconservative artifacts, we embed a flux-form inductive bias by parameterizing the windowed update in explicit divergence form. We also provide a data-driven guideline for selecting the memory length Tin via the decorrelation time of a closure-injection diagnostic computed from filtered trajectories. We validate on the coarse-grained viscous Burgers' equation, the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, and two-dimensional turbulent flows, obtaining stable autoregressive rollouts with improved long-horizon accuracy and statistical fidelity.
Junfeng Chen
Department of Mathematics, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China