Overview

Neural operators learn maps from input fields, parameters, or geometries to output fields, often approximating the solution map of a partial differential equation. DeepONet uses branch and trunk networks, Fourier Neural Operators learn interactions in spectral space, and graph and transformer operators handle irregular meshes and complex geometries; physics-informed losses and structure-preserving designs add physical constraints. These models can make repeated simulation, forecasting, and inverse design much faster than running a numerical solver for every case. A central challenge is making predictions reliable across new resolutions, geometries, and physical regimes while preserving stability over long rollouts and matching classical solvers when high accuracy is required.

Latest papers

313 papers52 papers in the last four weeks, up 24% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

May 31, 2026

Cellular Sheaf Neural Operators for Structure-Preserving Surrogate Modeling of Constrained PDEs

Neural operators provide fast surrogate models for PDE simulations, but standard architectures often treat geometry and discretization as secondary to field data. Physical states are usually represented as grid-channel stacks, even when different quantities naturally belong on vertices, edges, faces, cells, boundaries, or interfaces and must satisfy compatibility constraints. We propose Cellular Sheaf Neural Operators, a discretization-aware framework for structure-preserving neural PDE surrogates. The method represents PDE states on oriented cell complexes, couples local feature spaces through learned restriction maps, and uses incidence/Hodge-informed message passing to follow computational geometry. Learned update heads pass through coboundary or flux maps, allowing selected constraints to arise from cell-complex structure rather than only from loss penalties. For magnetohydrodynamics, this yields face-based magnetic-flux updates driven by edge electromotive fields and finite-volume-style fluid updates driven by learned face fluxes and cell sources. On turbulent MHD and fusion-equilibrium surrogate tasks, the method improves structure-sensitive diagnostics, including rollout behavior, divergence control, spectral error, and equilibrium-regression accuracy. These results indicate that cellular-sheaf structure is a useful inductive bias for neural PDE surrogates in constrained multiphysics systems.
May 30, 2026

Limits of Resolution Equivariance in Fourier Neural Operators

Fourier Neural Operators are often assumed to generalize across spatial resolutions, enabling training on a coarse grid and deployment on a finer grid. We test this assumption by contrasting two inference-time choices when moving from training resolution ss to test resolution S>sS>s: running FNO directly at SS, or running at ss and upsampling the prediction to SS via Fourier zero-padding. On Darcy flow, we observe that direct fine-grid inference is not reliably beneficial and can be worse than the low-grid-plus-upsampling baseline. We further analyze layerwise spectra and find that, under Fourier truncation, intermediate representations increasingly concentrate energy in low frequencies, with high-frequency output produced mainly by late nonlinear/decoder stages. This offers a mechanistic explanation for why FNO can perform well while retaining few modes, yet remain sensitive under resolution shifts. Our findings highlight a simple but strong baseline for cross-resolution evaluation and point to nonlinear aliasing as a key obstacle to zero-shot resolution equivariance.
May 29, 2026

Is Zero-Shot Super-Resolution Possible in Operator Learning?

Neural operators are often reported to exhibit zero-shot super-resolution, a phenomenon in which a model trained on coarse grids produces accurate predictions on finer testing grids without additional retraining. Despite strong empirical evidence, the theoretical foundations of this phenomenon remain unclear. In this work, we provide a systematic theoretical study of zero-shot super-resolution in operator learning. We first show that zero-shot super-resolution can be information-theoretically impossible even in benign settings such as when the input functions are available over the entire continuum and the ground truth is a simple rank-one linear operator. We then identify H{" o}lder smoothness of the output functions as a sufficient condition for zero-shot super-resolution and derive corresponding generalization bounds. Finally, we also validate the identified failure modes through experimental results.
May 29, 2026

Functional Attention: From Pairwise Affinities to Functional Correspondences

Learning mappings between infinite-dimensional function spaces, or operator learning, is essential for many machine learning applications. Although transformer-based operators are popular, they often rely on token-wise attention. These methods treat continuous fields as discrete tokens and usually ignore the global functional structure. We introduce Functional Attention, which reinterprets attention as a functional correspondence between adaptive bases. Inspired by geometric functional maps, our method replaces softmax affinities with structured linear operators. This yields a compact, generalizable, resolution-invariant representation that explicitly captures global dependencies. Experiments demonstrate that Functional Attention can match state-of-the-art performance in many operator learning tasks, including solving PDEs, 3D segmentation, and regression, while remaining robust to varying discretizations. Project page is available at https://github.com/xjffff/FUNCATTN.
May 29, 2026

LFNO: Bridging Laplace and Fourier via Transient-Steady Decomposition

We introduce the Laplace-Fourier Neural Operator (LFNO), a unified framework for modeling dynamical systems across transient and steady-state regimes by integrating the spectral advantages of Laplace and Fourier Neural Operators. LFNO employs a dual-branch architecture that explicitly decomposes system dynamics into transient and steady-state components. We evaluate LFNO on nine benchmarks, including three ODE systems (Duffing, Lorenz, and Pendulum) and six PDE systems (Euler-Bernoulli beam, Heat, Reaction-diffusion, Brusselator, Burgers, and Navier-Stokes). LFNO significantly outperforms existing operators on ODE systems, where transient dynamics dominate, and consistently surpasses LNO while achieving performance competitive with FNO on PDE benchmarks. Furthermore, LFNO offers improved stability and physical interpretability through its component-wise decomposition. These results demonstrate that LFNO provides a robust and unified approach for learning complex dynamical systems across multiple temporal scales.
May 28, 2026

Neural Operator-Based Surrogate Model for CFD:Helical Coil Steam Generator in Small Modular Reactor

Real-time thermal-hydraulic simulation is essential for digital twin (DT) technology that supports the safe and efficient operation of small modular reactors (SMRs). Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) provides high-fidelity flow analysis, but its computational cost prevents direct use in DT applications. AI-based surrogate modeling has been actively investigated to address this limitation, yet neural operator--based surrogates for CFD-level transient analysis of SMR-specific geometries have not been reported. This study presents an integrated framework that combines a reduced-order model (ROM) with neural operators, applied to the helical coil steam generator (HCSG) of the System-integrated Modular Advanced Reactor (SMART). Two ROM strategies tailored to each CFD data type were compared, an MLP-based autoencoder (AE) for unstructured mesh data and a convolutional autoencoder (CAE) for structured mesh data, and each was coupled with the deep operator network (DeepONet) to construct the latent DeepONet (L-DeepONet). The Fourier neural operator (FNO) was additionally adopted for comparison. A multi-scale technique was incorporated into both frameworks to mitigate spectral bias and improve the prediction of Kármán vortex streets developing inside the HCSG. The multi-scale L-DeepONet captured the instantaneous periodic vortex dynamics in both velocity and pressure fields, while the FNO and its multi-scale variant predicted the time-averaged mean flow and provided reliable pressure drop estimates. These complementary characteristics provide a practical model-selection guideline that links each architecture to specific DT objectives based on CFD data type and the required level of flow resolution.
May 26, 2026

High-Fidelity Industrial Crash Dynamics Prediction via Geometry-Aware Operator Learning with Memory-Efficient Low-Rank Attention

Automotive crashworthiness optimization remains a safety-critical challenge, requiring the management of large-scale nonlinear structural deformations and energy dissipation through iterative, high-fidelity simulations. While traditional finite element solvers are computationally prohibitive, emerging operator learning frameworks provide rapid surrogate predictions; however, applying them to industrial-scale crash analysis, where complex geometry, contact nonlinearities, and rapidly evolving transient deformation coexist, remains an open challenge. In this paper, we demonstrate that the GeoTransolver framework provides a viable solution for accurate, high-fidelity crash dynamics prediction at industrial scale. Benchmarked on complex bumper beam and full-vehicle crash datasets, GeoTransolver captures multi-scale geometric context and accurately resolves plastic deformation patterns as well as acceleration profiles at critical occupant locations. Beyond the architecture itself, we propose and systematically evaluate a suite of temporal prediction recipes, including one-shot, time-conditional, and autoregressive rollout strategies, demonstrating that the one-shot approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with significantly reduced training overhead and inference latency. As a secondary contribution, we introduce a Fast Low-rank Attention Routing Engine (FLARE)-based modification to the GeoTransolver attention backbone that reduces memory overhead by approximately 2x while further improving predictive accuracy for O(N) long-range, high-frequency transients, preserving the geometry-aware cross-attention strengths of the base framework. Our results highlight the practical viability of geometry-aware operator learning for high-fidelity surrogate modeling of complex, safety-critical automotive dynamics.
May 26, 2026

APEX: Amplitude Anchors and Phase Priors for Target-Scarce Higher-Frequency Wave Prediction

Learning-based surrogates have become increasingly effective for wave-field prediction, and neural operators in particular have shown strong performance within observed frequency regimes. However, higher-frequency prediction under scarce target supervision remains comparatively underexplored, especially in wave problems where higher-frequency data are substantially more expensive to simulate or measure than lower-frequency data. A central difficulty is that cross-frequency transfer is inherently asymmetric: coarse amplitude structure remains relatively stable across frequencies, whereas phase-sensitive oscillatory structure deteriorates much more rapidly as frequency increases. Motivated by this asymmetry, we propose APEX, Amplitude-anchored and Phase-prior-guided Enhancement from eXtrapolated coarse predictions, a framework for target-scarce higher-frequency wave-field prediction. A lower-frequency neural operator first provides a coarse prediction in the target-frequency regime, from which we retain only the amplitude as a transferable structural anchor. A conditional flow-matching enhancer then reconstructs the target higher-frequency field under the guidance of a Green's-function-inspired phase prior. Experiments on SimpleWave, Helmholtz, and Maxwell benchmarks show that APEX consistently outperforms direct lower-to-higher extrapolation, target-adapted operator, and joint generative baselines under limited target-frequency supervision. Our results suggest that reliable higher-frequency prediction of oscillatory wave fields should not rely on direct end-to-end transfer of the full complex field, but instead on explicitly reusing transferable coarse structure while separately recovering the missing oscillatory detail.
May 25, 2026

Accelerating Bayesian inverse design in computational fluid dynamics using neural operators

Bayesian inverse design provides a principled framework for inferring aerodynamic geometries from sparse flow observations while quantifying uncertainty. However, its practical use in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is severely limited by the cost of repeated high-fidelity simulations required for gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling. While surrogate models are commonly proposed to reduce this cost, their effect on posterior geometry and uncertainty, especially for shock-dominated flows, remains poorly understood. In this work, we demonstrate that neural operator surrogates can be embedded directly within the MCMC inference loop while preserving posterior structure. Using a fully Bayesian inverse formulation of quasi-one-dimensional nozzle flow, we demonstrate that geometry parameterization plays a decisive role in identifiability and posterior conditioning, with cubic B-splines yielding stable and physically meaningful uncertainty estimates. Building on this formulation, a Deep Operator Network trained on CFD-generated data is substituted for the CFD solver within a No-U-Turn Sampler, while keeping the likelihood model, priors, and sampling configuration unchanged. Across sparse to fully observed regimes, surrogate-based inference reproduces the posterior geometry and uncertainty trends of the CFD reference. As a result of surrogate integration, total inference time is reduced to under one second, corresponding to a speedup exceeding three orders of magnitude. In addition, a direct inverse neural operator is examined as a deterministic alternative for inverse design, enabling single-shot geometry reconstruction without posterior sampling. These results demonstrate that neural operator-accelerated Bayesian inference enables practical, uncertainty-aware inverse design workflows for aerodynamic applications.
May 24, 2026

Courant: a State-Adaptive Perceiver-Based Neural Surrogate with Local Support and Interpretable Field Decomposition

We introduce "Courant", a Perceiver-based encoder-processor-decoder surrogate model that has latent features exhibiting adaptive specialization and local support in the physical space, enabling functionality akin to an adaptive hp-refinement scheme, an attribute that is highly desirable in traditional numerical solvers and scientific machine learning broadly. The proposed architecture combines a shared random Fourier feature coordinate embedding, state-adapted latent queries, and a light-weight decoder. Courant is trained end-to-end with steady or transient simulation data and only a standard L_2 prediction loss in the physical space, achieving competitive accuracy on benchmarks. We demonstrate that Courant's inductive biases yield latents that are interpretable by design: they develop multiscale geometric specialization in the simulation domain and track coherent structures in the time-dependent case, acting analogously to time-evolving spatial basis functions and allowing for decoding a compact, geometry-anchored, partition-of-unity-like decomposition of the simulated field.
May 24, 2026

IV-Net: A neural network for elliptic PDEs with random and highly varying coefficients

We introduce a novel neural operator architecture designed to approximate solutions of linear elliptic partial differential equations with high-contrast, spatially varying coefficients. The network, termed the Iterated V-shaped Net (IV-Net), realizes a mapping from the input coefficients and righthand side to the corresponding solution field. The architecture of IV-Net is informed by, and closely resembles, a V-cycle multigrid solver. The IV-Net model is parameterized via convolutional layers defined in the physical domain. For coercive problems with highly heterogeneous coefficients, the proposed network exhibits superior performance relative to a proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) approach and several existing neural operator architectures. For low-frequency oscillatory Helmholtz problems with smooth coefficients, its performance is similar to that of a Fourier neural operator. We analyze the approximation error and convergence behavior of IV-Net, its data efficiency, and its dependence on the underlying discretization mesh. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical effectiveness of the architecture through a series of numerical experiments, including applications to uncertainty quantification, inverse problems, and prediction of quantities of interest.
May 23, 2026

WLNO: Wavelet-Laplace Neural Operator for Solving Partial Differential Equations

This work introduces the Wavelet-Laplace Neural Operator (WLNO), a novel neural operator that fuses Haar wavelet multi-scale spatial decomposition with the Laplace-domain pole-residue formulation of the Laplace Neural Operator (LNO). While LNO captures transient and steady-state dynamics through learnable system poles and residues, it lacks an explicit mechanism for extracting spatially localized multi-scale features inherent in complex PDE solutions. WLNO addresses this by augmenting the LNO core with a parallel single-level Haar discrete wavelet transform (DWT) branch that decomposes the lifted feature map into four frequency subbands: approximation (LL), horizontal detail (LH), vertical detail (HL), and diagonal detail (HH) and applies independent learned 1×11\times1 convolutions to each subband before reconstruction via the inverse DWT. The two branches are fused through a learnable sigmoid-gated weight αwavα_\mathrm{wav}, initialized to give a small initial contribution to the wavelet branch, allowing the model to adaptively balance Laplace-domain dynamics against spatial multi-scale features throughout training. WLNO is evaluated against LNO on five benchmark PDE problems using identical hyperparameters, training data, and evaluation protocols: the diffusion equation, the Burgers equation, the reaction-diffusion system, Darcy flow, and the two-dimensional Navier-Stokes equation. WLNO consistently outperforms LNO on all five problems, with the most pronounced improvement on problems with strong spatial multi-scale structure, such as the Burgers equation with sharp shock fronts and the Navier-Stokes equation with coherent vortical structures, while remaining consistent across smoother and elliptic problems. These results demonstrate that wavelet-based multi-scale spatial decomposition is a principled and effective complement to Laplace-domain operator learning.
May 23, 2026

Learning Laplacian Eigenspace with Mass-Aware Neural Operators on Point Clouds

The eigendecomposition of the Laplace--Beltrami Operator (LBO) is fundamental to geometric analysis, yet computing its low-frequency eigenmodes remains a significant bottleneck due to the high cost of iterative solvers on large-scale data. To amortize this cost, we introduce the Neural Eigenspace Operator (NEO), a feed-forward framework designed to predict the spectrum directly from point clouds. Crucially, NEO circumvents the ill-posed nature of standard eigenvector regression, which suffers from intrinsic sign flips and rotation ambiguities, by learning the stable, invariant low-frequency subspace instead. Specifically, the network predicts a redundant set of basis functions whose span robustly covers the target eigenspace, allowing for the recovery of accurate eigenpairs via a lightweight Rayleigh--Ritz refinement. To handle irregular sampling, we propose a mass-aware neural operator that incorporates per-point area weights into attention-based aggregation, improving robustness to non-uniform densities and enabling zero-shot generalization across resolutions. Our approach achieves near-linear runtime scaling and substantial wall-clock speedups over iterative solvers at comparable accuracy, and exhibits strong zero-shot transfer to high-resolution point clouds. The resulting eigenpairs support standard spectral geometry tasks, while the raw basis functions provide effective point-wise features for downstream learning. Code: https://github.com/Adversarr/NEO.
May 22, 2026

Discontinuous Galerkin Neural Operator for Pathology Defocus Deblurring

Defocus deblurring in pathological microscopy remains challenging due to the spatially varying and locally discontinuous nature of optical blur induced by a position-dependent integral imaging process. Existing deep learning methods, constrained by shift-invariance assumptions and limited interpretability, are not well suited to such heterogeneous blur patterns. Neural operators provide a principled alternative by modeling defocus formation directly as an integral operator, offering a new perspective on defocus deblurring. However, most existing neural operator architectures for low-level vision rely on globally parameterized kernels that assume smoothness and stationarity, limiting their ability to model heterogeneous and locally discontinuous blur patterns. To address this limitation, we propose the Discontinuous Galerkin Neural Operator (DGNO), which parameterizes the integral kernel using a discontinuous Galerkin formulation with element-local volume operators and interface numerical fluxes. DGNO provides a principled combination of locality, heterogeneity modeling, and global coherence while preserving the underlying physics of optical image formation. Extensive and insightful experiments demonstrate that DGNO surpasses state-of-the-arts, delivering sharper reconstructions, robust handling of spatially varying blur, and scalable high-resolution performance. The code will be released at https://github.com/DeepMed-Lab-ECNU/Single-Image-Deblur.
May 21, 2026

Iterative Refinement Neural Operators are Learned Fixed-Point Solvers: A Principled Approach to Spectral Bias Mitigation

Neural operators serve as fast, data-driven surrogates for scientific modeling but typically rely on a monolithic, single-pass inference procedure that struggles to resolve high-frequency details, a limitation known as spectral bias. We introduce the Iterative Refinement Neural Operator (IRNO), which augments pre-trained operators with a learned refinement module iteratively applied via fixed-point iteration. IRNO decomposes the prediction into a coarse initialization followed by successive residual corrections, paralleling classical numerical solvers. Under local assumptions, we establish contraction of the induced operator, ensuring convergence to a unique fixed point. To explicitly target high-frequency errors, we propose a progressive spectral loss that adaptively increases penalty on high-frequency components over refinement steps during training. Across physical systems, IRNO consistently lowers error, with up to 56.05% improvement on turbulent flow. On Active Matter, spectral analysis reveals that, relative to base operator, the normalized error ratios decrease to 27.72-36.10% in low-, 5.07-6.68% in mid-, and 1.48-2.04% in high-frequencies, remaining stable beyond the trained iteration count. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaotianliu-dartmouth/Iterative_Refinement_Neural_Operator
May 21, 2026

Neural Flow Operators can Approximate any Operator: Abstract Frameworks and Universal Approximations

We introduce an abstract neural flow framework for neural networks and neural operators. The framework contains two continuous-depth models, namely neural flows with composition and separation structures, and covers both finite-dimensional function approximation and infinite-dimensional operator approximation. We prove well-posedness and universal approximation properties for the corresponding neural flows, including, to the best of our knowledge, the first universal approximation result for flow-based models between infinite-dimensional spaces. We also obtain universal approximation results for convolutional neural flow models. Through suitable time discretizations, the composition structure recovers ResNet-type architectures, while the separation structure, via a splitting-based discretization, yields plain architectures. This gives a unified flow-based route to both residual and plain architectures for neural networks and neural operators with fully connected or convolutional linear layers.
May 21, 2026

IKNO: Infinite-order Kernel Neural Operators

Neural operators have achieved significant success in modern scientific computing due to their flexibility and strong generalization capabilities. Existing models, however, primarily rely on first-order kernel integral approximations, which severely limit their expressivity. To address this, we propose the Infinite-order Kernel Neural Operator (IKNO), which constructs neural operators via infinite-order kernel integrals and admits an elegant closed-form finite approximation. We develop two complementary infinite-order neural operator constructions: IKNO-Vanilla, which applies the full-kernel resolvent on the product grid via Kronecker eigendecomposition, and IKNO-TP, an alternative tensor-product operator that composes per-axis resolvents. Furthermore, we develop fast computation schemes for both variants of IKNO, which achieve outstanding global information aggregation while maintaining high computational efficiency. Empirically, we evaluate our IKNO on both time-dependent and time-independent benchmarks with arbitrary input shapes, including large-scale industrial datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the IKNO method consistently achieves the SOTA accuracy with significant improvements on nearly all benchmark datasets while maintaining scalability to very large point clouds.
May 20, 2026

Data-Efficient Neural Operator Training via Physics-Based Active Learning

Solving partial differential equations with neural operators significantly reduces computational costs but remains bottlenecked by high training data requirements. Active learning offers a natural framework to mitigate this by selectively acquiring the most informative samples in an iterative manner. We introduce physics-based acquisition - a novel physics-informed active learning algorithm that leverages the partial differential equation residual to guide data selection. We validate the method by presenting numerical experiments for the 1D Burgers equation and the 2D compressible Navier-Stokes equations. We show that, in our experiments, physics-based acquisition consistently outperforms random acquisition and matches the state of the art in data efficiency. At the same time, it has the unique advantage of injecting a physics inductive bias into the training process, ensuring that simulation cost is spent where the model's physical understanding is weakest.
May 19, 2026

Nonlocal operator learning for fMRI encoding and decoding tasks

Functional MRI data exhibit high-dimensional spatiotemporal structure, making both prediction and decoding challenging. In this work, we investigate neural integral-operator-based models for encoding and decoding tasks in fMRI, with particular emphasis on the role of nonlocal spatiotemporal context. We implement a latent neural integral operator framework that performs fixed point iterations in an auxiliary space from which classification and stimuli prediction is performed via a decoder. We evaluate our model on two open-source fMRI datasets. Our experiments examine both decoding of stimuli from fMRI recordings and encoding of fMRI dynamics from stimulus representations. A main focus is the effect of spatiotemporal context: we systematically compare short and long temporal windows, as well as the use of visual cortex vs whole brain recordings, and analyze their influence on performance and latent-space geometry. Across tasks and datasets, larger temporal windows generally improve results and produce more structured learned representations. In decoding experiments, the learned latent space often provides clearer class separation than the raw data. In encoding experiments, although absolute performance remains moderate due to the difficulty of the task, longer temporal windows still yield consistent gains. These findings suggest that neural integral operators provide a promising framework for modeling fMRI dynamics and that broader spatiotemporal context can be beneficial for both prediction and representation learning. More broadly, the results indicate that exploiting distributed nonlocal structure in brain dynamics requires model architectures specifically designed to capture such dependencies.
May 18, 2026

Neural Operators for Design-Space Surrogate Modeling of Tendon-Actuated Continuum Robots

Continuum robots enable dexterous manipulation in constrained environments, but require accurate and efficient models for real-time manipulation and control. Traditional physics-based models can be computationally expensive and may suffer from inaccuracies due to unmodeled effects, while current learning-based methods often generalize poorly beyond the specific robot on which they are trained. We present a formulation of surrogate modeling for tendon-driven continuum robots as an operator learning problem that maps robot design parameters and tendon actuation inputs to resulting configurations. This formulation enables a single trained model to generalize across a large class of robot designs. We develop four novel neural operator architectures--two based on Deep Operator Networks (DeepONets) and two based on Fourier Neural Operators (FNOs)--and train them on simulation data to predict robot configurations. All architectures achieve good accuracy while allowing for fast and accurate generalization across designs. Our results demonstrate that operator learning provides an effective and generalizable surrogate for continuum robot mechanics in the design space, enabling fast modeling for control, planning, and design optimization in surgical and industrial applications.
May 18, 2026

PACE-FNO: Physics-Aligned Canonical Equivariance for Fourier Neural Operators

Neural operators are often tested on states that differ physically from training data. A distinct failure occurs when the physical dynamics are unchanged but the observed coordinate frame differs from training. PACE-FNO addresses this case by estimating the frame, predicting after pulling the field to a canonical representative, and restoring the requested terminal frame. The default inference path uses one forward prediction; optional test-time adaptation (TTA) updates only the low-dimensional coordinate. On translated and Galilean-shifted Burgers and shallow-water systems, PACE-FNO lowers out-of-distribution (OOD) relative error by up to 12×12\times relative to a data-augmented Fourier Neural Operator (FNO+Aug). A matched-estimator control supports attributing the gain to prediction in the canonical frame rather than added estimator capacity. Our analysis separates the canonical approximation error from the two alignment residuals. We also test regional WeatherBench2 time-series forecasting with the fifth-generation ECMWF reanalysis (ERA5) under natural time OOD, where PACE-FNO and FNO achieve nearly identical performance. Experiments with approximate rotation, other backbones, irregular domains, rollouts, and image data delineate the conditions under which the mechanism is effective.
May 18, 2026

Function graph transformers universally approximate operators between function spaces

We study the approximation of nonlinear operators between function spaces by transformers. Our approach is to lift functions to measures supported on their graphs and leverage a recently introduced measure-theoretic view of transformers. A function hh is represented by its graph measure γhγ_h, with finite tokens {(xj,h(xj))}j=1N\{(x_j,h(x_j))\}_{j=1}^N being its empirical approximations. We show that this framework elegantly models discretization refinement via convergence of measures and provides a natural setting for operator learning. Within this framework, we introduce function graph transformers, a graph-preserving subclass of measure-theoretic transformers that maps graph measures to graph measures, which is to say that outputs remain single-valued functions. Crucially, this additional structure does not reduce generality: we prove that the resulting graph-preserving maps can be approximated by finite compositions of standard softmax self-attention layers and pointwise MLPs, yielding universal approximation results for broad classes of nonlinear operators. Unlike existing theoretical approaches to operator learning with transformers, the measure-theoretic framework also accommodates regularized negative-order Sobolev inputs for which discretization invariance is particularly challenging, as well as query points on different output domains. Overall, function graph transformers provide a continuum viewpoint and mathematical toolkit for transformer-based operator learning, clarifying the roles of positional encodings, graph structure, regularization, and ensuring consistency across discretizations.
May 17, 2026

Stability and Discretization Error of State Space Model Neural Operators

Neural operators have emerged as a powerful, discretization-invariant framework for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). Although established approaches like the Deep Operator Network (DeepONet) have successfully achieved universal approximation for operators, and architectures such as Fourier Neural Operators (FNOs) have shown algebraic convergence rates, a precise theoretical connection between the continuous theory and its discrete numerical implementation remains a challenge. Specifically, the relationship between the continuous formulation and the discrete numerical stability has yet to be fully explored. In this paper, we address this gap by establishing theoretical guarantees for the discretization error and stability of neural operator approximation schemes. We prove analytical bounds that link solution regularity to input discretization, providing a formal quantification of neural operator accuracy under real-world numerical constraints. We derive these bounds to the specific cases of State Space Model-based Neural Operators (SS-NOs) and FNOs, thus providing a new discretization error theorem for these models. Additionally, through an input-to-state stability (ISS) analysis, we formally assess the impact of discretization on the stability of SS-NOs results obtained in the continuous domain. Our empirical experiments on 1D and 2D benchmarks validate our theoretical bounds and show the robustness of SS-NOs under varying resolutions.
May 16, 2026

Diffusion-Based Stochastic Operator Networks for Uncertainty Quantification in Stochastic Partial Differential Equations

We introduce a novel framework for uncertainty quantification of solution operators associated with stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs). Although SPDEs play a central role in modeling complex physical systems under uncertainty, their practical use typically requires specifying the magnitude and structure of model uncertainties that are often unknown and difficult to infer from noisy measurements. To address this challenge, we develop a stochastic operator-learning framework that learns directly from noisy data and outputs both a mean solution field and a quantification of uncertainty. The proposed method, namely the Stochastic Operator Network (SON), is constructed by combining the structure of the Deep Operator Network (DeepONet) with Stochastic Neural Networks (SNNs) to model stochasticity and enable probabilistic prediction. The training procedure is carried out by minimizing a Hamiltonian-type loss and optimizing the resulting objective using the Stochastic Maximum Principle. Numerical experiments on benchmark SPDEs under multiple uncertainty sources demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the proposed method in capturing solution structure and quantifying predictive uncertainty.
May 15, 2026

Symplectic Neural Operators for Learning Infinite Dimensional Hamiltonian Systems

The modeling and simulation of infinite-dimensional Hamiltonian systems are central problems in mathematical physics and engineering, however they pose significant computational and structural challenges for standard data-driven architectures. In this work, we introduce the Symplectic Neural Operator, a neural operator architecture designed to preserve the symplectic structure intrinsic to Hamiltonian PDEs. We provide a theoretical characterization of their symplecticity and establish a rigorous long-term stability result based on the combination of symplectic structure preservation and learning accuracy. Numerical experiments on canonical Hamiltonian PDEs corroborate this theoretical result and show that SNOs exhibit improved energy behavior compared with non-structure-preserving neural operators.
May 15, 2026

Martingale Neural Operators: Learning Stochastic Marginals via Doob-Meyer Factorization

Neural operators excel as deterministic surrogates, but inevitably collapse to the conditional mean when applied to stochastic PDEs, discarding the variance and tail structure upon which uncertainty quantification depends. Recovering this structure typically requires Monte Carlo rollouts or grafted generative models, both of which surrender the one-shot efficiency and resolution invariance that define the operator paradigm. To resolve this, we draw on the Doob-Meyer theorem, which establishes that any semimartingale fundamentally decomposes into a predictable drift and an unpredictable, zero-mean martingale. Translating this theorem into an architectural prior, we introduce the Martingale Neural Operator (MNO). MNO maps an initial condition directly to the conditional mean and covariance of the terminal law, parameterized by a drift-like mean and a low-rank factor BφB_φ with Bφ⊤BφB_φ^\top B_φ positive semi-definite by construction. For our experiments, we use a Gaussian residual instantiation. Across 1D SPDEs, rough volatility, and 2D operator tasks, MNO reduces Wasserstein distance by up to 120×120\times on φ4φ^4 field theory and 68×68\times on stochastic Burgers, evaluating ∼3×\sim 3\times faster than a conditional diffusion baseline at matched wall-clock training budgets. On 2D tasks, MNO is comparable to FNO on zero-shot resolution transfer and turbulent flow, while quasi-deterministic systems such as Gray-Scott remain a failure mode.
May 15, 2026

AOT-POT: Adaptive Operator Transformation for Large-Scale PDE Pre-training

Pre-training neural operators on diverse partial differential equation (PDE) datasets has emerged as a promising direction for building general-purpose surrogate models in scientific machine learning. However, the inherent complexity and structural diversity of PDE solution operators make multi-PDE pre-training fundamentally challenging. Existing methods mainly address this by increasing model capacity, while leaving the target solution operators unchanged. Inspired by classical numerical analysis, we instead propose to transform complex and diverse solution operators into simpler, better-aligned forms that are easier to model jointly. Since the optimal transformation varies across PDE types, it must be adaptive and input-dependent, allowing a single neural operator to approximate an entire family of operators. We instantiate this idea as AOT-POT (adaptive operator-transformation for pre-training operator transformer), which expands hidden representations into multiple parallel streams, adaptively aggregates and redistributes them before and after each sub-layer, and mixes streams through Sinkhorn-projected doubly stochastic matrices for stable training. These mechanisms together reshape diverse solution operators into a unified form that can be effectively modeled by a single architecture. Empirically, AOT-POT achieves state-of-the-art performance on 12 PDE benchmarks with only 3% additional parameters, reducing relative L2 error by up to 77.6% (40.9% on average). Fine-tuning AOT-POT further reduces L2 error by up to 92% on in-domain PDEs and 89% on out-of-domain PDEs (unseen types during pre-training), demonstrating that adaptive operator transformation is an effective and complementary direction for advancing PDE foundation models beyond simply scaling model capacity.
May 14, 2026

Discovering Physical Directions in Weight Space: Composing Neural PDE Experts

Recent advances in neural operators have made partial differential equation (PDE) surrogate modeling increasingly scalable and transferable through large-scale pretraining and in-context adaptation. However, after a shared operator is fine-tuned to multiple regimes within a continuous physical family, it remains unclear whether the resulting weight-space updates merely form isolated regime experts or reveal reusable physical structure. Starting from a shared family anchor, we fine-tune low- and high-regime endpoint experts and show that their updates can be separated into a family-shared adaptation and a direction aligned with the underlying physical parameter. This separation reinterprets endpoint experts as finite-difference probes of a local physical direction in weight space, explaining why static averaging can interpolate between regimes but attenuates endpoint-specific physics. Building on this perspective, we propose Calibration-Conditioned Merge (CCM), a post-hoc coordinate readout method for composing neural PDE experts along this physical direction. Given physical metadata, a calibrated coordinate mapping, or a short observed rollout prefix, CCM infers the target composition coordinate and deploys a single merged checkpoint for the remaining rollout. We evaluate CCM on the reaction--diffusion system, viscosity-parameterized two-dimensional Navier--Stokes equations, and radial dam-break dynamics. Across these benchmarks, CCM achieves its strongest gains in extrapolative regimes, reducing out-of-distribution rollout error relative to the family anchor by 54.2%, 42.8%, and 13.8%, respectively. Further experiments across FNO scales, a DPOT-style backbone, and ablations confirm that endpoint fine-tuning is not arbitrary checkpoint drift, but reveals a calibratable physical direction for training-free transfer across PDE regimes.
May 13, 2026

Topology-Preserving Neural Operator Learning via Hodge Decomposition

In this paper, we study solution operators of physical field equations on geometric meshes from a function-space perspective. We reveal that Hodge orthogonality fundamentally resolves spectral interference by isolating unlearnable topological degrees of freedom from learnable geometric dynamics, enabling an additive approximation confined to structure-preserving subspaces. Building on Hodge theory and operator splitting, we derive a principled operator-level decomposition. The result is a Hybrid Eulerian-Lagrangian architecture with an algebraic-level inductive bias we call Hodge Spectral Duality (HSD). In our framework, we use discrete differential forms to capture topology-dominated components and an orthogonal auxiliary ambient space to represent complex local dynamics. Our method achieves superior accuracy and efficiency on geometric graphs with enhanced fidelity to physical invariants. Our code is available at https://github.com/ContinuumCoder/Hodge-Spectral-Duality
May 13, 2026

U-HNO: A U-shaped Hybrid Neural Operator with Sparse-Point Adaptive Routing for Non-stationary PDE Dynamics

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.