Partial Differential Equations

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Period ending 2026-09-21

2 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Partial Differential Equations.

Period ending 2026-09-14

5 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Partial Differential Equations.

Period ending 2026-09-07

5 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Partial Differential Equations.

134 papers

Latest in Partial Differential Equations

Sep 16, 2026math.NA

HiLNO: A Hierarchical Latent Neural Operator with Multi-Scale Supervision for PDEs on General Geometries

Latent neural operators improve the efficiency of operator learning for partial differential equations (PDEs) by performing the main computation on compact latent representations. However, directly compressing the input representation to obtain such compact representations may discard solution-relevant spatial information, especially for PDE solutions with multiscale structures. To address this problem, we propose HiLNO, a hierarchical latent neural operator that constructs a fine-to-coarse-to-fine latent space and further introduces multi-scale supervision (MSS) and anisotropic Gaussian attention. The hierarchy mitigates potential information loss during compression, while MSS aligns intermediate predictions with downsampled target fields, encouraging solution-relevant structures to be captured across multiple spatial scales. Anisotropic Gaussian attention enables feature transfer across the hierarchy, making HiLNO applicable to general geometries. Experiments on representative PDE benchmarks and a large-scale automotive aerodynamics task show that HiLNO achieves competitive predictive accuracy, while reducing the parameter count by an average of 84.4% and FLOPs by an average of 69.2% compared with LinearNO. Additional experiments demonstrate effective generalization to unseen spatial resolutions. Code is available at https://github.com/JcLimath/HiLNO.
Zhicheng Hu, Jiacheng Li, Min Yang
Sep 14, 2026math.NA

Physics Informed Random Feature Neural Networks for Solving PDEs

Machine learning-based partial differential equations (PDEs) solvers have attracted significant attention in recent years. Most progress in this area has been driven by deep neural networks such as physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and kernel method (such as physics-informed Gaussian Processes). We introduce a physics-informed random feature method for countering part of the spectral bias which PINN-based solvers are facing for a certain class of PDEs. Random feature method was originally proposed to approximate large-scale kernel machines and can be viewed as a specialized randomized neural network. Compared to other state-of-the-art PINN-based solvers which require a large number of collocation points, our proposed method reduces the computational complexity. In this paper, we develop a rigorous approximation error analysis and derive high-probability error bounds on the H1H^1 norm. We provide extensive numerical tests for verifying our theoretical guarantees on error decay rates, as well as several comparison tests to showcase our claimed capability for combating spectral bias in these deep learning based methods.
Chi-An Chen, Chunyang Liao, Ming Zhong
Sep 8, 2026cs.LG

Learning Metamaterial Eigenmodes with Wavelet-Encoded Fourier Neural Operators

Machine learning surrogates based on neural operators have shown broad applicability in solving forward PDE problems. However, eigenvalue problems, in which an eigenparameter and one of several valid eigenmodes must be simultaneously solved, remain difficult because standard operator learning formulations assume a unique input-output map. This work demonstrates that Fourier Neural Operators (FNOs), combined with wavelet-based encodings of PDE inputs, can learn and predict multiple eigenmodes of the elastic wave equation, corresponding to deformation modes of acoustic waves propagating through arbitrary metamaterial geometries. We provide a mechanistic explanation and experimental evidence for why wavelet encodings are well matched to the dual spatial-spectral structure of the FNO, enabling deterministic mode selection on both continuous-valued and binary-valued geometries within a single model, and for why prediction accuracy varies with geometric discontinuities. For metamaterial design, the resulting surrogate accelerates the simulation stage of the design cycle by three orders of magnitude relative to finite element analysis on a consumer-grade CPU, while preserving high fidelity. These results also carry broader implications for designing input encodings in other multi-mode PDE solvers based on spectral neural operators.
Han Zhang, Alexander Ogren, Cynthia Rudin +2
Sep 7, 2026cs.LG

Two-Scale Localized PCA-Net: Coarse-Global and Local-Residual Representations for Artifact-Reduced PDE Operator Learning

Localized dimensionality reduction improves the scalability of operator learning for high-dimensional partial differential equations (PDEs), but independently decoded local patches can introduce block offsets, interface mismatches, and spurious high-wavenumber content. We introduce Two-Scale Localized PCA-Net, which decomposes the solution into a coarse-global component and local residual corrections. A compact global PCA basis captures domain-scale structure, while nonoverlapping local PCA bases represent the remaining fine-scale residual. A block-balanced latent objective couples the two representations, and optional interface-aware fine-tuning further promotes continuity through reconstruction and trace losses. On Poisson benchmarks, the two-scale representation substantially reduces reconstruction error and visible block artifacts relative to plain and overlap-based localized PCA-Net while approximately halving PCA fitting cost relative to overlap. On heterogeneous Darcy flow, it strongly reduces interface and discrete-residual errors, with more modest reconstruction gains. Ablations show that the primary improvement arises from the two-scale output representation, while interface-aware fine-tuning provides complementary continuity refinement. Overall, separating globally coherent structure from localized residual detail provides an efficient representation for artifact-reduced PDE operator learning.
Mrigank Dhingra, Jordan Stout, Omer San
Sep 7, 2026cs.LG

Latent-MoE: Domain-Aware Mixture-of-Experts for PDEs with Multi-Regime Physics

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) struggle on PDEs whose governing physics varies across the domain. We trace this to a structural property of standard coordinate networks: their neural tangent kernel (NTK) is translation-variant and lets training points of large coordinate magnitude disproportionately influence predictions elsewhere, producing long-range coupling and gradient conflict during training. We show analytically and empirically that mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures with centered, compact-support routers yield a uniformly banded NTK whose kernel-regression weights decay exponentially with distance, localizing the learning. Building on this, we propose \emph{Latent-MoE}, which interleaves domain-aware MoE blocks within a shared backbone. Unlike FB-PINNs or X-PINNs, which rigidly partition both the domain and the parameters so that the parameters on different subdomains are updated independently, Latent-MoE is designed to preserve the localization benefit of domain-aware routing while allowing capacity to flow across regions through the shared backbone. On standard homogeneous-physics benchmarks Latent-MoE is competitive with established baselines; on benchmarks with multi-stage time-variable physics, where global models and rigid domain decompositions both fall into spurious solutions, it improves over them by more than an order of magnitude, with markedly reduced gradient conflict during training.
Hanwen Wang, Paris Perdikaris
Sep 3, 2026math.NA

Residual neural networks overcome the curse of dimensionality for semilinear heat equations

Rigorous results show that feedforward neural networks can overcome the curse of dimensionality in the numerical approximation of high-dimensional partial differential equations (PDEs), but comparatively little is known about residual neural networks (ResNets) in the nonlinear PDE setting. We prove that ResNets overcome the curse of dimensionality in the numerical approximation of solutions of semilinear heat equations with globally Lipschitz continuous, gradient-independent nonlinearities: under polynomial growth and network approximability hypotheses on the PDE data, there exist η(0,)η\in(0,\infty) and ResNets Ψd,εΨ_{d,\varepsilon}, dNd\in\mathbb{N}, ε(0,1]\varepsilon\in(0,1], with at most ηdηεηηd^η\varepsilon^{-η} parameters whose realizations approximate the solution in dimension dd with an L2L^2-error of at most ε\varepsilon. The proof represents one deterministic realization of a multilevel Picard estimator by a ResNet whose shortcut connections transmit the spatial variable and a scalar accumulator, while the residual branches successively add the summands of the estimator. For ridge-sum initial conditions, admissible sigmoidal activations, and globally Lipschitz truncations of the nonlinearity, we obtain, for every ξ>0ξ>0, the explicit bound Cξd4+ξε(3+ξ)C_ξd^{4+ξ}\varepsilon^{-(3+ξ)} on the number of parameters.
Ilkhom Mukhammadiev, Diyora Salimova
Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

Geometry-aware Latent Autoregressive Generative Model for PDEs in Complex Domains

Solving multiphysics partial differential equations (PDEs) remains a major challenge in scientific computing, especially for highly complex μμm-scale tortuous geometries critical to energy and chemical engineering. We address this challenge by proposing a Geometry-aware Latent Autoregressive generative Model for PDEs (GeoLAMP) for solving physics within highly irregular and tortuous structures. GeoLAMP introduces a dual-encoder architecture on graph representations to jointly capture global topology and fine-scale geometric features, enabling an effective transition from real-space fields to compact latent representations. In the latent space, we propose a causal self-attention transformer with flow matching to model temporal dynamics, allowing stable and scalable block-wise autoregressive prediction. A flexible decoder reconstructs high-resolution physical fields on arbitrary points. We establish three multiphysics benchmark datasets in complex geometries, covering reactive flow, heat convection, and elasticity. GeoLAMP consistently achieves the most stable autoregression performance on these datasets, maintaining low errors throughout the entire rollout horizon. Our results provide a systematic study of geometry-aware learning for PDEs in μμm-scale complex geometries and offer new insights into block-wise time marching of latent autoregressive PDE modeling via a flow matching framework.
Zi Wang, Minghui Xu, Tapan Mukerji
Aug 31, 2026stat.ML

Learning the Geometry of Admissible Hypotheses through Inductive Bias in Training Distributions

Scientific discovery often requires reasoning over competing hypotheses that are consistent with experimental observations. For mixed-variable and combinatorial hypothesis spaces, however, constructing probabilistic representations remains challenging because both the active model components and their associated parameters are unknown. In this work, we present a framework for learning continuous latent representations of admissible partial differential equations (PDEs) by embedding a scientific inductive bias directly into the training distribution. Progressively richer structural principles (e.g., sparsity, logical dependencies, common PDE families, and physical admissibility) are used to generate a structured distribution of hypotheses from which a gated variational autoencoder learns a continuous latent manifold. Experimental results show that the resulting 11-dimensional representation accurately reconstructs a broad collection of representative PDEs, while exhibiting smooth geometric transitions both within and across equation families. Through an ablation study we further demonstrate that introducing scientific principles reduces both structural misclassifications of equation forms and parameter estimation errors when reconstructing a representative benchmark set of admissible partial differential equations. These results show that embedding a scientific inductive bias in the training distribution enables the learning of compact and geometrically meaningful hypothesis manifolds, providing a principled foundation for future inference over competing governing equations.
James Crowley, Faez Ahmed, Anton van Beek
Aug 31, 2026cs.AI

DiffPDE: Masked Diffusion Language Models as PDE Solver

Existing approaches for synthesizing Partial Differential Equation (PDE) solvers predominantly rely on autoregressive models, yet their global left-to-right decoding incurs substantial redundancy when addressing inherently localized bugs. In this work, we challenge this inefficient paradigm and propose DiffPDE, a framework leveraging discrete diffusion language models for targeted code repair. By introducing a localized re-masking and infilling strategy, DiffPDE regenerates only erroneous regions while preserving correct context, naturally aligning generation with the sparse nature of PDE errors. Furthermore, to handle coupled bugs requiring sequential interventions, we present Iterative Debugging GRPO (ID-GRPO), a reinforcement learning scheme that enables multi-round debugging within single trajectories via intermediate rewards. Experiments on PDEBench show that DiffPDE achieves competitive accuracy, outperforms same-scale AR models, and significantly accelerates repair.
Wenxuan Guo, Yuyang Hong, Lubin Fan +4
Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

Learning PDE Time-Stepping with Neural Cellular Automata

Classical numerical solvers for partial differential equations (PDEs) are computationally expensive to solve repeatedly across varying initial conditions, motivating the need for learned surrogates. In this paper, we propose a trainable Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) based surrogate model for learning long time PDE dynamics. Rather than mapping an entire initial field to a full trajectory in one shot, our proposed model learns a small, local, homogeneous update rule that is applied identically and repeatedly at every grid cell, mirroring the locality of differential operators. We benchmark this framework against three baselines: PDE - Net, a modified physics-informed neural network (PINN), and a Fourier Neural Operator (FNO), on five canonical PDEs (heat, advection, Burgers, Allen - Cahn, and Fisher - KPP), evaluated at temporal domain two times beyond the training temporal domain. The proposed model achieves the lowest long-horizon relative errors on the majority of the experiments.
Esha Saha, Hao Wang
Aug 30, 2026cs.LG

Joint Spatiotemporal Spectral Neural Operators for Learning PDEs on Irregular Domains

Learning solution operators for partial differential equations (PDEs) on irregular and geometry-dependent domains remains a central challenge in scientific machine learning. While spectral methods provide strong inductive biases for modeling global interactions, they are typically limited to regular domains, and existing neural approaches often require domain warping, interpolation, or costly geometric embeddings. We introduce the \textbf{Graph Spectral Neural Operator (GSNO)}, a neural operator that combines spatial graph spectral decompositions with temporal Fourier transforms through a unified space--time spectral kernel. This formulation enables globally coherent operator learning on non-Cartesian discretizations without domain warping or autoregressive rollouts. By replacing learned geometric embeddings with a graph Laplacian spectral basis, GSNO provides geometry-aware spectral learning with low parameter complexity. Across steady and unsteady PDE benchmarks on irregular and geometry-dependent domains, GSNO achieves strong accuracy with reduced runtime and parameter counts, while demonstrating robust zero-shot generalization across mesh resolutions and geometry families.
Abdolmehdi Behroozi, Chaopeng Shen
Aug 30, 2026cs.LG

Sensitivity-Constrained Neural Operators for Data-Efficient Forward and Inverse Modeling of Partial Differential Equation Systems

Neural operators provide fast surrogates for partial differential equation (PDE) solvers, but their reliability can degrade for high-dimensional spatial inputs and inverse or repeated inference. State-only training constrains solution values but not the learned input--output response. We study sensitivity-constrained neural operators (SC-NOs), which augment standard training with sampled solver-derived Jacobian supervision. Selected sensitivities from differentiable solvers or discrete adjoints are matched during training, allowing response information to be amortized across minibatches without imposing the full Jacobian at every update. We evaluate SC-NO on advection--diffusion and RANS--Spalart--Allmaras benchmarks, input-dimensionality scaling tests, long-horizon autoregressive rollout, and a shallow-water Tohoku tsunami source-inversion case. Sensitivity supervision improves forward prediction and yields larger gains in gradient-based inverse reconstruction of distributed fields. Scaling experiments show an improved accuracy--cost tradeoff for high-dimensional gridded inputs, while ablations indicate that state values and Jacobian information provide complementary supervision. In the tsunami case, SC-FNO reconstructs gridded seafloor deformation from sparse early gauge observations and forecasts subsequent wave propagation in a near-real-time proof-of-concept workflow. These results support sampled sensitivity supervision as a practical way to improve neural PDE surrogates when forward accuracy, inverse stability, robustness, and computational cost must be considered together.
Abdolmehdi Behroozi, Chaopeng Shen, Daniel Kifer +1
Aug 12, 2026cs.LG

Distillation of Foundation Models for Time-dependent PDEs

Foundation models for time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) are trained on large and diverse collections of physical systems and can generalize effectively to new downstream tasks. After fine-tuning on only a few trajectories from a target domain, they can achieve strong accuracy in low-data regimes. However, these models are typically large and computationally intensive, limiting their usefulness as fast surrogates for numerical solvers. We propose Teacher Rollout Extension (TREX), a knowledge distillation framework that transfers the predictive capability of a pretrained foundation model into a compact and efficient student. Starting from a fine-tuned teacher, TREX augments limited downstream data by generating long synthetic trajectories through teacher rollouts, optionally with periodic noise injection. This procedure samples from the teacher-induced rollout distribution without requiring explicit knowledge of the initial-condition distribution, while exposing the student to long-horizon states and local recovery behavior around states encountered during autoregressive prediction. The student can further incorporate task-specific inductive biases, such as equivariance, that the teacher does not necessarily enforce. We evaluate TREX on multiple PDE benchmarks. The resulting students can match or surpass the teacher's accuracy while reducing the number of parameters by several orders of magnitude and achieving more than an order-of-magnitude speedup in inference.
Daniel Musekamp, Boshra Ariguib, Andrei Manolache +1
Aug 12, 2026cs.LG

RECAST: A Machine-Learning Framework for Correction and Super-Resolution of Coarse-Grid PDE Solvers

Coarse-grid numerical solvers can substantially reduce the computational cost of time-dependent PDE simulation, but under-resolution often degrades both the trajectory and the spatial fidelity of the solution. We introduce RECAST (Recurrent Error Correction And Super-resolution of coarse-grid Trajectories), a machine-learning framework designed to restore this lost accuracy while retaining coarse-grid evolution. RECAST combines learned correction within the numerical time-stepping loop with reconstruction of the corresponding fine-grid state from the corrected coarse history. We evaluate the framework on six one-dimensional PDE systems spanning transport, diffusion, dispersion, reaction, and wave dynamics, using spatial grids coarsened by factors of 8-16 and 1000-step closed-loop rollouts from unseen initial conditions. Across the test cases, RECAST remains closely aligned with the fine-grid reference solutions and reduces time-averaged relative error by approximately 50-92% compared with the corresponding uncorrected coarse-grid solvers. Additional tests show generalization to unseen PDE parameter values, while comparison with a contemporary coarse-correction architecture shows that RECAST achieves lower error and better long-horizon agreement with the fine-grid reference over 5000-step rollouts. These results demonstrate that the learned correction and reconstruction capabilities of RECAST can enable substantially coarser PDE evolution without the corresponding loss of solution fidelity, providing a proof-of-concept route toward machine-learning acceleration of higher-dimensional numerical simulations across science and engineering.
Maryam Reza, Farbod Faraji
Aug 10, 2026cs.CE

The Kuramoto Neural Operator: Learning to Solve PDEs via Coupled Oscillator Dynamics

Operator learning is a rapidly advancing area of computational science. It is particularly well suited to problems where a partial differential equation (PDE) must be solved repeatedly under varying physical configurations. Most existing architectures represent the solution operator in a fixed basis. While this assumption is well aligned with global structures, it is less suitable for phenomena governed by local interactions in physical space. We explore an alternative perspective motivated by the observation that the continuum limit of coupled oscillator systems can describe a broad class of PDEs. Building on this idea, we introduce the Kuramoto Neural Operator (KNO), which represents the solution through the evolution of a latent field of interacting oscillators. Across a diverse collection of PDE benchmarks, KNO achieves strong predictive performance, with improvements over competing approaches. Our experimental evaluation also includes an extensive ablation study that quantifies the contribution of each architectural component incorporated into KNO. Furthermore, we show that the model's prediction error is closely linked to the collective dynamics of the latent oscillators. It varies systematically with their degree of synchronization, providing insights into the underlying mechanisms.
Petr Badolia, Leonid Obukhov, Dmitry Bylinkin +1
Aug 10, 2026cs.LG

MoNo: Multiscale Optimal Transport Neural Operator for Solving PDEs on General Geometries

Transformer-based neural operators have achieved substantial progress in solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) by projecting spatial observations into compact latent tokens and learning physical interactions in latent spaces. However, we reveal that existing learnable projection mechanisms cannot ensure stable and balanced assignments from observation points to latent tokens, causing some latent tokens to be over-assigned while others remain underutilized. This limitation further restricts the design of hierarchical architectures, as assignment imbalance is continuously inherited and amplified across latent spaces, eventually causing severe token collapse in deeper spaces. To address these issues, we propose MoNo (Multiscale Optimal Transport Neural Operator), a progressive multiscale neural operator that efficiently solves PDEs on general geometries through stable latent-space construction. At its core is CoTAP (Cross-scale Optimal Transport Assignment and Projection), a novel latent-space construction method that formulates cross-space assignment between adjacent spaces as an entropy-regularized optimal transport problem, thereby constructing balanced bidirectional projections and stable latent spaces. CoTAP also ensures stable information transfer across multiple latent spaces, further enabling multiscale architectures on general geometries, which in turn support more efficient learning of long-range physical interactions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MoNo outperforms existing state-of-the-art neural operators in both prediction performance and computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/ZijiangY1116/MoNo.
Zijiang Yang, Xiaomeng Wu, Dongmei Fu
Aug 10, 2026math.NA

Walk-on-Spheres Monte Carlo and deep neural network approximations of elliptic PDEs with drift and killing

In this paper we provide Monte Carlo and deep neural network approximations for stochastic representations of solutions to linear elliptic partial differential equations with constant diffusion, drift and killing. Building on the modified Walk-on-Spheres algorithm of Beznea et al. (arXiv:2209.01432), we introduce Monte Carlo estimators that explicitly incorporate sampled random times arising in the analyzed stochastic representations. We establish uniform error bounds for these estimators and show that, under suitable assumptions, a prescribed approximation accuracy is achieved with sample complexities growing at most polynomially in both the inverse accuracy and the problem dimension. Furthermore, we prove a deep neural network approximation result for the stochastic representations. Assuming suitable neural network representations of the boundary data and the distance function to the boundary, we use the constructed Monte Carlo to design deep neural networks that approximate the representation uniformly with a number of parameters growing at most polynomially in the inverse accuracy and the problem dimension. These results extend previous complexity analyses to a broader class of elliptic equations involving drift and killing.
Konrad Kleinberg, Thomas Kruse
Aug 7, 2026cs.AI

Unsupervised Adaptation of PDE Foundation Models

Pretrained partial differential equation (PDE) foundation models can generalize across different equations, but adapting them to unseen PDE systems typically requires dense solution data, which is often expensive or unavailable. To address this limitation, we propose an unsupervised PDE-based finetuning framework that eliminates the need for ground-truth solutions. We first pretrain a neighborhood attention Transformer on diverse time-dependent PDEs spanning varying spatial scales, yielding transferable representations across heterogeneous equations. In the adaptation stage, we construct a physics-based objective using the PDE residual and boundary conditions, and finetune the model on unseen equations via low-rank adaptation (LoRA). To address the uneven learning across physical quantities in standard LoRA, we introduce NSLoRA, a Newton-Schulz orthogonalized variant that rebalances adaptation. Our method achieves performance comparable to supervised LoRA finetuning without requiring any ground-truth solutions, while consistently outperforming competitive neural operator baselines and recent PDE foundation models across heterogeneous PDE benchmarks spanning multiple spatial dimensions.
Ziye Song, Zhao Wei, Xin Yu +2
Aug 6, 2026cs.LG

Kastor: An efficient fine-tuning strategy for generative emulation of PDE simulations

Machine learning offers a promising avenue to accelerate physical simulations by replacing computationally expensive traditional Partial Differential Equation (PDE) solvers with fast, differentiable surrogate models. However, standard auto-regressive ML emulators often suffer from error accumulation over long horizons and struggle to capture the stochasticity of complex physical systems. In this paper, we propose Kastor, a comprehensive methodology to adapt a deterministic physics foundation model into a highly efficient and accurate generative surrogate. First, we introduce a two-stage inference scheme that combines a large-stride causal auto-regressive model with a non-causal temporal super-resolution network, significantly reducing error accumulation while minimizing computational cost. Second, we present Mean prediction regularization (MPR), a novel training objective that constrains the generative model to predict the deterministic distribution mean under null noise conditioning. This regularization dramatically improves the performance and stability of both Functional Generative Networks (FGN) and diffusion-based emulators. Finally, we demonstrate that incorporating spatial gradient matching improves the accuracy and physical fidelity of the simulations as measured by power spectrum density. Extensive evaluations on diverse simulation datasets of the benchmark The Well show that with these components, our model outperforms competing methods in forecasting accuracy, spectral consistency, and computational efficiency. Our model achieves a 42.9% average reduction in forecasting compared to our reference based on the Walrus finetuning methodology, and outperforms Walrus for 8 out of 10 datasets on variance-normalized RMSE (VRMSE).
Guillaume Couairon, Alexis Jacq, Yu-Han Wu +4
Aug 5, 2026cs.LG

Continual-Learning Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Parameterized Partial Differential Equations

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) incorporate governing equations into neural-network training and can approximate PDE solutions without requiring large observational datasets. Parameterized PINNs (ParamPINNs) further take physical parameters as inputs, allowing a single model to represent a family of PDE solutions over a parameter domain. Existing ParamPINNs, however, still face inefficient training, uneven accuracy across parameters, and overfitting to a limited set of sampled parameter tasks, which can impair generalization to unsampled parameters. To address these issues, we propose a continual-learning physics-informed neural network (CL-PINN), which treats PDE instances at different parameter values as related tasks and learns them sequentially. CL-PINN combines Bayesian-optimization-based active parameter selection, task-wise dynamic loss weighting, sparse physics-constrained replay, and an optional parameter subnetwork to improve task allocation and knowledge retention under bounded active-task capacity. It requires no observational data and is designed to solve parameterized PDEs over relatively broad parameter domains under limited computational resources. Multi-seed evaluations on five benchmarks, including one continuous function and four parameterized PDEs, show that Bayesian selection substantially reduces objective-loss queries relative to grid-greedy search, while sparse replay mitigates forgetting of earlier tasks. Under the prescribed within-case resource protocols, CL-PINN generally provides higher and more balanced solution accuracy than fixed-sampling and grid-greedy baselines. CL-PINN offers a practical route toward learning PDE solutions that generalize across physical parameters and has the potential to support reusable physics-informed surrogates for large-scale engineering parameter studies.
Xujia Chen, Xinyue Hu, Letian Chen +2
Aug 1, 2026cs.LG

Modeling Unknown Nonlocal PDE Systems via Flow Map Learning

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
Jul 31, 2026cs.RO

Localization in Spatiotemporal Fields via Environmental PDEs

This paper proposes a localization framework that uses spatiotemporal fields governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) as localization signatures. Two PDE classes are considered: the shallow water equations, which describe free-surface flows in coastal and riverine environments, and the advection-diffusion equation, which models the transport and mixing of scalar quantities such as temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen. A numerical PDE solver provides predicted fields over the domain, and multiple field channels are fused as multimodal measurements to improve localization accuracy. We formulate the problem within a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter (RBPF) that partitions the vehicle state into a nonlinear component sampled by particles and a linear sensor bias component tracked analytically via per-particle Kalman filters. This factorization reduces the required number of particles compared to a standard particle filter while accounting for realistic sensor drift. Simulation studies on both PDE scenarios show that the RBPF consistently outperforms a standard particle filter in terms of final position error and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) across varying particle counts. Field experiments with an autonomous surface vehicle measuring salinity, temperature, and dissolved oxygen validate that PDE-governed environmental fields provide sufficient spatial variability for practical localization. Related experimental videos are available at https://localization-environmental-pdes.github.io/.
Jose Fuentes, Abdullah Al Redwan Newaz, Ana Cavalcanti +1
Jul 31, 2026cs.AI

Geometry-aware Incremental Neural Operator for Long-Horizon PDE prediction

Neural operators have shown strong potential for learning solution operators of partial differential equations (PDEs). However, long-horizon autoregressive prediction remains challenging: local errors accumulate as spectral inconsistency, phase misalignment, or mean drift. Existing methods mainly improve state representations and operator backbones, while leaving the repeatedly applied latent transition increment weakly structured, allowing spectral errors and unstable channel couplings to accumulate during rollout. To address these issues, we propose a geometry-aware incremental neural operator (GeoIncNO) for stable long-horizon PDE prediction. GeoIncNO predicts latent increments for residual advancement and uses lightweight low-rank projectors to regulate channel coupling within active frequency bands derived from the increment spectral energy distribution. To reduce physical-space reconstruction errors, GeoIncNO further introduces a mean--fluctuation decoupled reconstruction mechanism, where stable mean structures and dynamic fluctuations are fused separately, and phase correction is applied only to the zero-mean fluctuation component. Extensive experiments on six PDE benchmarks, covering 1D, 2D, and 3D dynamical systems, show that GeoIncNO achieves consistently strong prediction accuracy, improved rollout stability, and better spectral fidelity compared with competitive neural-operator baselines.
Jiaquan Zhang, Shuxu Chen, Haifan Meng +6
Jul 31, 2026cs.LG

Dynamics-aware identification of governing equations from sparse and noisy data

Sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics (SINDy) and PDE functional identification (PDE-FIND) recover parsimonious ordinary and partial differential equations (ODEs and PDEs) from data. However, sparse and noisy temporal measurements can make derivative estimates unreliable. To address this problem, we evaluate Koopman-based upsampling techniques implemented with dynamic mode decomposition (DMD), extended DMD (EDMD), and optimized DMD. These methods learn finite-dimensional approximations of Koopman evolution on selected observables and are used to interpolate and denoise snapshots inside the observed time window before derivative estimation and sparse regression. The empirical benchmark comprises two ODE systems, Lorenz-63 and Van der Pol, and three periodic PDE systems, Burgers, Fisher-Kolmogorov-Petrovskii-Piskunov (Fisher-KPP), and linear advection-diffusion, over sparse and noisy sampling regimes. Polynomial EDMD gives the strongest ODE results, especially in coefficient accuracy. The PDE results are system-dependent: low-rank DMD-assisted reconstructions improve Burgers and advection-diffusion discovery, while the raw baseline (without upsampling) remains competitive for the Fisher-KPP data. A comparison against linear and smoothing-spline interpolation techniques shows that the selected Koopman-based preprocessors provide overall performance gains over these non-dynamical alternatives. We also demonstrate that DMD-assisted upsampling can stabilize Pareto-based non-oracle support-size selection. Overall, Koopman-based upsampling is best viewed as a dynamics-aware preprocessing step that can reduce derivative-estimation error when its observable representation and low-rank structure are appropriate for the data.
Pongpisit Thanasutives, Yoshinobu Kawahara
Jul 30, 2026cs.LG

Feature Interaction Modeling for Neural Operators

Despite the many variants of DeepONet that have been proposed, query-based operator networks still struggle with shock-dominated and low-viscosity PDEs, whose sharp moving discontinuities and slowly decaying solution spectra challenge finite-dimensional separable representations. In this work, we propose \emph{Feature Interaction Modeling Operator} (FM-Operator), a point-wise query neural operator that explicitly models feature construction and interactions between sensor observations and query coordinates. Our design is motivated by a reinterpretation of the canonical DeepONet aggregation through the lens of multiplicative interactions. Specifically, the branch--trunk inner product admits the equivalent form b(u)τ(y)=1diag(b(u))τ(y)\boldsymbol{b}(u)^\top \boldsymbolτ(y)=\boldsymbol{1}^\top \operatorname{diag}(\boldsymbol{b}(u))\,\boldsymbolτ(y), revealing that the two representations interact only along corresponding latent dimensions and therefore constitute a diagonally constrained multiplicative interaction. This observation suggests that, beyond improving the individual branch and trunk networks, the structure through which function and query representations interact is itself an important inductive bias in point-wise operator learning. FM-Operator accordingly redesigns both feature construction and feature interaction, enabling structured information exchange beyond the conventional branch--trunk coupling while retaining point-wise query evaluation. Experiments across multiple PDE benchmarks demonstrate that FM-Operator consistently outperforms vanilla DeepONet and achieves clear improvements over the strong Shift-DeepONet baseline. These results suggest that explicitly designing representation construction and interaction provides a promising direction for improving the effectiveness of DeepONet-style query-based neural operators.
Quan Gu, Xiaoduo Li, Hongxia Liu
Jul 30, 2026math.AP

Neural Network Approximation of Solutions to Fractional Parabolic Partial Differential Equations

We establish a dimension-efficient neural network approximation theory for solutions to fractional parabolic equations with lower-order drift and potential terms. By introducing anisotropic spectral Barron spaces, which measure temporal and spatial regularity separately in frequency space, we first develop a dimension-independent maximal regularity theory for these equations, using dimension-independent multiplication estimates and the method of continuity to incorporate the lower-order terms. A key technical novelty is the application of the Vandermonde matrix to the global-in-time extension of the finite-time fractional heat semigroup with sufficient regularity at the initial time, thereby enabling analysis of the forward-in-time evolution via the global space-time Fourier structure of anisotropic Barron norms. We also show that a corresponding uniform-in-time estimate of the spectral Barron regularity generally fails. Finally, we derive n1/2n^{-1/2} two-layer approximation bounds in mixed Sobolev norms for non-constant periodic activations and, under additional anisotropic Barron regularity, for non-periodic activations satisfying a polynomial-decay condition.
Jae-Hwan Choi, Hyojae Lim, Jinsol Seo +2
Jul 28, 2026cs.LG

Physics-Informed Broad Learning System: An Efficient Backpropagation-Free Framework for Solving Partial Differential Equations

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) by embedding governing physical laws into deep neural networks. However, their reliance on computationally expensive gradient-based optimization and deep architectures often results in slow training, high computational cost, and limited scalability. In this work, we propose a novel physics-informed broad learning system (PI-BLS), the first physics-informed learning framework based on broad RdNNs. The proposed formulation embeds the governing differential operator and the associated initial and boundary constraints directly into a linear output-layer optimization problem, thereby replacing nonlinear gradient-based training with a deterministic least-squares solution obtained via the pseudoinverse. Consequently, the entire learning process is reduced to a single linear optimization stage while preserving the underlying physical constraints. As a result, PI-BLS offers an efficient learning paradigm for a physics-informed learning framework for solving PDEs that eliminates iterative backpropagation while preserving the underlying physical constraints. Experimental results on representative forward PDE benchmarks demonstrate that PI-BLS achieves competitive and often superior performance with reduced training time and model parameters compared with conventional PINNs.
Pinki Khatun, M. Sajid, Abhinav Jha +1
Jul 27, 2026cs.LG

Global Convergence of DGM and PINN Algorithms for Solving Nonlinear PDEs

The Deep Galerkin Method (DGM) and Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have become widely-used methods for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) in the rapidly growing field of scientific machine learning. In these methods, a neural network is trained to approximate the PDE solution by using (stochastic) gradient descent to minimize the PDE residual of the neural network. Due to the non-convexity of the PDE residual objective function, the trained neural network may, in principle, only converge to a local minimizer of the objective function (which would not be a solution of the PDE). Therefore, there is a longstanding question regarding the mathematical foundations of these algorithms, and it is highly valuable to establish that the trained neural network will converge to the PDE solution. For a class of semi-linear PDEs (nonlinear in the solution and its first derivative), we prove that neural networks trained with gradient descent to minimize the PDE residual objective function will converge to the PDE solution.
Justin Sirignano, Konstantinos Spiliopoulos, Samuel Cohen
Jul 27, 2026cs.LG

Physics Transformer: Tailoring Transformer for General PDE Prediction

Transformer architectures have attracted increasing attention for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), owing to their flexibility in handling irregular discretizations and their ability to capture long-range physical dependencies. However, unlike discrete language tokens or fixed-resolution image patches, observed physical fields are finite samples of underlying infinite-dimensional functions. Consequently, effectively applying Transformers to PDEs requires a tokenizer that respects the functional nature of physical fields and constructs physically expressive tokens from arbitrary discretizations.To this end, we propose \methodname{Physics Transformer}, a function-projection-based Transformer architecture for physical field prediction. Physics Transformer treats a physical field as a continuous function and partitions its discretization into locality-preserving spatial patches. Within each patch, it dynamically learns a set of adaptive local basis functions and projects the sampled field onto these bases to obtain compact physics tokens. The resulting tokens capture diverse latent physical states while preserving fine-scale spatial structures, enabling efficient global interaction through factorized attention across space and physical states. The projected representation further supports efficient decoding at arbitrary query locations. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks, ranging from two-dimensional PDE dynamics to industrial-scale three-dimensional CFD simulations, demonstrate that Physics Transformer accurately captures fine-grained physical structures and achieves state-of-the-art predictive performance. These results establish function projection as a practical and effective foundation for designing Transformer architectures for PDE solving.
Guoze Sun, Rui Zhang, Jiankai Tang +4
Jul 27, 2026cs.LG

Perturbative-NeuSA: A Structured Spectral Framework for Time-Dependent PDEs

Neural spectral PDE solvers often learn an entire unresolved vector field even when an inexpensive approximate model can already capture most of the trajectory. Here we introduce Perturbative-NeuSA, a residual formulation that decomposes the target solution into a low-fidelity background and a high-resolution perturbation, so that only the unresolved dynamics is learned. Starting from the exact perturbation equation, the method combines a fixed spectral operator, a background-dependent correction, the background defect in the target PDE, and an optional neural closure. This construction makes the roles of physical structure and neural closure separately measurable. Across 2D Burgers, Klein-Gordon, and heterogeneous 2D wave equations, the deterministic structured solver outperforms the trained NeuSA baseline while requiring no neural-network training. The largest gains occur on Burgers, where the deterministic correction reduces training and extrapolation errors by factors of 24 and 44, respectively. In addition, a Klein-Gordon sweep over seven background resolutions shows that the effect of the closure is conditional: it improves a poor background by 3.6 times, becomes neutral at intermediate resolutions, and degrades a well-resolved background. For the wave equation, however, the closure provides an additional 18% reduction when the remaining residual is interface-localized. Multi-initial-condition diagnostics further show that the useful closure regime depends on the initial-condition spectrum and can disappear in extrapolation when structured correction already captures the dominant Burgers dynamics. Perturbative-NeuSA therefore reframes neural closure as a conditional, diagnosable correction governed by background fidelity, residual organization, and compatibility with the closure model.
Xianli Zhu, Jia Yin
Jul 26, 2026cs.LG

On the post-hoc Evaluation of PDE Discovery: A Multifaceted Challenge of Scientific Advancement

Partial differential equation (PDE) discovery aims to identify from data the governing law of a physical system. Constituting a cornerstone of scientific advancement, it has become during the past decade a major line of research in the rapidly evolving field of Physics-informed Machine Learning (PiML). Among the remaining open problems to address in this domain, the post-hoc evaluation of discovered PDEs raises the particular difficulty of being multifaceted. Indeed, it requires jointly considering predictive accuracy, physical consistency, interpretability, and out-of-distribution generalization capacity. Given that some of these properties are conflicting, it is worth noting that the wide range of existing evaluation metrics only partially address the overall problem, potentially leading to overly interpreted conclusions about the validity of a presumed new physical theory. From an abundant literature spanning machine learning, numerical analysis, information theory or symbolic regression, we propose, to our knowledge, the first taxonomy of PDE evaluation metrics, and discuss their advantages and limitations in depth. Based on the observation that evaluation is often achieved on a case-by-case basis and that a universally accepted methodology remains elusive, we further provide recommendations with the aim of promoting standardized and reliable practices, before sketching promising future lines of research in this field. We argue that this paper is intended both for ML experts who design new PDE discovery algorithms and for users of these methods aiming, in real applications, to discover and validate well-founded scientific laws.
Baptiste Mathevon, Farah Cherfaoui, Amaury Habrard +1
Jul 26, 2026cs.LG

Extending Fourier Neural Operators for Modeling Parameterized and Coupled PDEs

Parameterized and coupled partial differential equations (PDEs) are central to modeling phenomena in science and engineering, yet neural operator methods that address both aspects remain limited. We extend Fourier neural operators (FNOs) with minimal architectural modifications along two directions. For parameterized dynamics, we propose a hypernetwork-based modulation that conditions the operator on physical parameters. For coupled systems, we conduct a systematic exploration of architectural choices, examining how operator components can be adapted to balance shared structure with cross-variable interactions while retaining the efficiency of standard FNOs. Evaluations on benchmark PDEs, including the one-dimensional capacitively coupled plasma equations and the Gray-Scott system, show that our methods achieve up to 55-72% lower errors than strong baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of principled modulation and systematic design exploration.
Cheng Jing, Uvini Balasuriya Mudiyanselage, Abhishek Verma +3
Jul 22, 2026cs.LG

PG-KINN: A Physics-Informed Petrov-Galerkin Kolmogorov-Arnold Network for Solving Forward and Inverse PDEs

Physics-informed learning of partial differential equations (PDEs) has been dominated by multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), whose spectral bias and dense parameterization limit both accuracy and interpretability. Kolmogorov Arnold Networks (KANs) mitigate these limitations because their learnable spline activations are structurally aligned with the piecewise-polynomial bases of classical discretizations. However, the way a PDE is cast into a loss functional is as decisive as the choice of approximator: strong-form residual minimization requires high-order derivatives and heavily weighted losses, the energy (Bubnov-Galerkin) form is restricted to self-adjoint operators and, as we show, collapses to a trivial solution for parameter-identification problems, and boundary integral forms require a known fundamental solution. We propose PG-KINN, a physics-informed KAN built on a Petrov-Galerkin formulation in which the trial space is a KAN and the test space is an independent, compactly supported, piecewise-polynomial space evaluated with Gauss-Legendre quadrature. Integration by parts lowers the differentiation order while retaining applicability to general non-self-adjoint, nonlinear, and inverse problems; the localized test functions turn the global residual into a set of element-wise weak residuals with favorable conditioning. On a suite of benchmarks spanning crack singularities, stress concentration, Neo-Hookean hyperelasticity, inverse parameter identification in heterogeneous media, and complex geometries, PG-KINN consistently outperforms legacy MLP baselines and state-of-the-art KAN-based strong/energy/inverse formulations (PIKAN). These results position the Petrov-Galerkin coupling of KAN trial spaces and polynomial test spaces as a robust and accurate route for AI-based computational mechanics.
Amirhossein Sadr, Nima Soltani, Vahideh Moghtadaiee +3
Jul 21, 2026cs.LG

Toward Goal-Agnostic Joint-Embedding Predictive Control of Partial Differential Equations

We present a goal-agnostic control framework for partial differential equations (PDEs) built around an end-to-end joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA). A lightweight 2D vision-transformer (ViT) and action-conditioned latent dynamics are trained offline without a reward or downstream goal, before being frozen and reused by a model-predictive path integral (MPPI) controller. We minimize a control objective in the latent space, initially expressed via the L2L^2 distance and additionally illustrate the benefit of recasting the control objective in terms of an explicit physical observable when available. By instead minimizing the tracking error for a learned linear kinetic-energy (KE) probe on the frozen latent-state rollouts, we demonstrate the ability to reproduce the control of held-out trajectories with R2=0.989R^2=0.989, while requiring no change to the underlying world model. For a controlled 2D Navier--Stokes benchmark, using a KE-probe within MPPI planning improves the mean native reward from 12.08±0.86-12.08\pm0.86 for latent-L2L^2 tracking to 10.90±0.91-10.90\pm0.91 (95% CI), all while lowering last-quarter velocity-field RMSE from 0.07650.0765 to 0.06920.0692. Across three intentionally withheld, dissimilar, aperiodic targets, KE planning lowers late field RMSE by 53%53\% relative to latent-L2L^2 planning (0.02200.0220 versus 0.04690.0469), winning across 30 paired comparisons. The same frozen model also supports stabilization around a steady-state configuration via direct regulation of KE, achieving 2.7%2.7\% mean relative error. While the latent probe proves brittle to measurement noise and missing pixels, our findings support the claim that latent dynamics can remain flexible and goal-agnostic, particularly when calibrated observables (granted they guarantee unique continuation) are a suitable objective for state control.
Jonathan Gallagher, Roberto Guglielmi
Jul 17, 2026math.NA

Non-Asymptotic Variational Learning for Monotone Nonlinear Multiscale Elliptic Equations: Scale-Robust Primal-Dual Bounds and Strong-Form Statistical Ill-Conditioning

We develop a non-asymptotic approximation, sampling, and finite-iteration optimization theory for variational physics-informed approximation of uniformly monotone nonlinear multiscale elliptic equations. For boundary-compatible neural feature classes, the population error splits into approximation, empirical quadrature, and projected-gradient terms, with all non-approximation constants uniform in the microscopic scale ε\varepsilon. Assuming a quantitative corrected H1H^1-estimate, a two-scale state class yields AmεC(ε+Φ0,m02+Φ1,m12)\mathcal A_m^\varepsilon \le C\bigl(\varepsilon+Φ_{0,m_0}^2+Φ_{1,m_1}^2\bigr) in arbitrary dimension. We further introduce a convex primal-dual physics loss whose population value is a computable upper certificate for the state error. With additional flux-corrector regularity, a divergence-compatible two-scale flux class gives a certified state-flux bound combining O(ε)O(\varepsilon) approximation, state and flux feature errors, empirical sampling error, and an O(K1)O(K^{-1}) optimization term. In contrast, for general periodic nonlinear fluxes satisfying a natural nondegeneracy condition, the empirical Rademacher complexities of strong-residual and squared-residual classes are bounded below by constant multiples of (εN)1(\varepsilon\sqrt N)^{-1} and (ε2N)1(\varepsilon^2\sqrt N)^{-1}, respectively. These optimizer-independent lower bounds hold in every spatial dimension. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted ε\varepsilon- and NN-scalings for nonlinear fluxes in d=1,2,3d=1,2,3, validate every computed primal-dual certificate, and show that corrector-enriched classes substantially reduce energy and H1H^1 errors as the microscopic scale is refined.
Ronald Katende
Jul 15, 2026cs.LG

LIGO-PINN: Learned Initialization via Gated Optimization to Alleviate Convergence Failures in Physics Informed Neural Networks

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have had a broad research impact in modeling domains governed by partial differential equations (PDE). However, PINNs have been shown to perform poorly, sometimes even converging to trivial solutions, in challenging PDE domains, or when generalizing to unseen but related PDE domains. Previously proposed solutions detail hyperparameter tuning to reduce loss imbalance between data-driven and physics guided losses, curriculum learning based training strategies, or dynamic re-sampling of hard collocation points. These methods face certain pitfalls: hyperparameter tuning is expensive, designing a training curriculum is ambiguous in multi-parameter PDE settings, and dynamic resampling still fails in complex PDE settings. Complementary to this line of thinking, we believe the initial PINN network weights also play a crucial role in the emergence of catastrophic failures during training, yet the effect of PINN weight initialization has been surprisingly under-investigated. To this end, we propose a framework for Learned Initialization via Gated Layerwise Optimization (LIGO-PINN) to overcome PINN convergence failures. Through rigorous evaluation on 1D and 2D PDE domains, including a challenging 2D fluid dynamics setting, we demonstrate that our methodology outperforms state-of-the-art methods designed to alleviate PINN failures, achieving a 91.5% average performance improvement across six baselines and 81% over the strongest baseline. We also verify that LIGO-PINN generalizes to 3D unstructured domains. Finally, we analyze training dynamics across all three PDE domains to explain both LIGO-PINN's improvement and the convergence failure of traditional PINNs. Code: https://github.com/scailab/ligo-pinn Keywords: Machine Learning, Physics-Informed Neural Networks, Deep Learning, PDE Modeling
Nilay Anurag, Shital Adhikari, Taniya Kapoor +1
Jul 15, 2026math.NA

Spectral-Informed Neural Networks Outperform Spectral Methods in High-dimensional PDEs

For low-dimensional problems (d3d\leq3), spectral methods can achieve exceptionally high accuracy. For middle-dimensional problems (4d104 \leq d \lesssim 10), spectral methods remain feasible through specific techniques such as sparse grids or hyperbolic cross. However, for high-dimensional problems (d10d\gg 10), spectral methods suffer frome the curse of dimensionality. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a promising approach to overcome this challenge, offering scalability to high dimensions, but often suffer from limited accuracy and efficiency. Recently proposed spectral-informed neural networks (SINNs) combine spectral methods with PINNs, operating directly in the spectral domain to avoid spatial derivative computations and to reduce memory consumption. In this work, we introduce Modified SINNs, which integrate coefficient decay scaling and basis embeddings motivated by harmonic analysis to enhance accuracy in high-dimensional problems and enable accurate approximation of unknown spectral coefficients. Numerical experiments on steady and time-dependent partial differential equations demonstrate that Modified SINNs outperform sparse grid spectral methods on middle-dimensional problems with incomplete spectral information and achieve superior accuracy compared to PINNs on high-dimensional problems.
Tianchi Yu, Ivan Oseledets
Jul 13, 2026cs.LG

SPARC-Net: A Spectral, Causality-Aware, and Hard-Constrained Physics-Informed Architecture for Stiff and Shock-Dominated Partial Differential Equations

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) provide a meshless approach for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), but suffer severe degradation in stiff and shock-dominated problems, where small PDE residuals can correspond to globally inaccurate solutions. We show these failures are multi-causal, arising from the concurrent interplay of (i) spectral bias against sharp features, (ii) imbalanced multi-term optimization and loss-weight collapse, (iii) violation of temporal causality, and (iv) under-resolved collocation. We present SPARC-Net, a unified architecture and training framework that jointly addresses all four pathologies. SPARC-Net leverages an adaptive multi-scale spectral encoder with a learnable spectral gate, a gated residual backbone, adaptive activations, and a hard-constraint output ansatz that exactly enforces initial and boundary conditions, structurally eliminating loss-weight collapse. Training employs stabilized gradient-norm loss balancing, floored causality-respecting residual weighting, and residual-based adaptive collocation (RAD). Validated against exact analytic and high-order spectral reference solutions across four canonical benchmarks -- viscous Burgers', Allen-Cahn, convection (beta=30), and reaction -- SPARC-Net yields substantial improvements over vanilla PINNs: relative L2 error drops from 1.47e-1 to 1.14e-1 on Burgers' (22% reduction), 9.93e-1 to 5.78e-2 on Allen-Cahn (94% reduction), and 9.82e-1 to 3.54e-3 on reaction (100% reduction). A characteristic-coordinate encoder for hyperbolic transport further reduces convection error from 5.14e-1 to 9.88e-5 (100% reduction). We report five-seed mean +/- standard deviation errors, Wilcoxon significance tests, full ablation studies, hyperparameter sensitivities, an extension to the 2D heat equation, and comparisons against parameter-matched baselines.
Divyavardhan Singh, Dimple Sonone, Hammad Mohammad +1
Jul 11, 2026cs.LG

The Differential Neural Tangent Kernel and Its Positivity

The Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) is one powerful tool for analyzing the training dynamics of neural networks in the over-parameterized regime. Recently, the theoretical framework has been extended to physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for solving linear PDEs, one highly popular class of neural PDE solvers. In the analysis, the positivity of the associated NTK plays a fundamental role. However, establishing the positivity of the NTK for PINNs is highly challenging, due to the presence of multiple differential operators. In this work, we propose a new theoretical framework, called Differential Neural Tangent Kernel (DNTK), for analyzing PINNs through the lens of the NTK, and establish the positivity of the infinite width DNTK for both shallow and deep neural networks for a wide class of activation functions, including RePU and smooth but non-polynomial activations, for all linear differential operators. These theoretical results lay the foundation for the analysis of gradient type algorithms for training PINNs.
Bangti Jin, Longjun Wu
Jul 2, 2026cs.LG

Frequency Shift Physics-Informed Extreme Learning Machine for Solving High-Frequency Partial Differential Equations

Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) with high-frequency solutions remains a central challenge in physics-informed machine learning due to spectral bias -- the tendency of neural networks to learn low-frequency components preferentially. This paper proposes a Frequency Shift Physics-Informed Extreme Learning Machine (FS-PIELM) framework that addresses this limitation through an additive mechanism for weight initialization. Rather than multiplying random weights by a scaling factor, the method translates the mean of the Gaussian weight distribution while keeping the variance fixed at unity, thereby avoiding the variance amplification inherent in scaling-based methods. Two variants are developed: FS-PIELM-L assigns independent frequency magnitudes to individual neurons, while FS-PIELM-G groups neurons for improved robustness. Theoretical analysis shows that the frequency variance under the proposed framework remains bounded and approaches unity regardless of target frequency, in contrast to the quadratic growth of conventional approaches. The method preserves the computational efficiency of extreme learning machines, requiring only a single linear solve. Experiments on seven benchmark problems spanning six equation types -- Helmholtz, wave, Poisson, Klein-Gordon, heat, and advection-diffusion -- on both regular and complex geometries show that the linear variant achieves the best accuracy in six of seven cases, with improvements of one to nearly five orders of magnitude over existing PIELM variants. The code and data accompanying this manuscript will be made publicly available at https://github.com/xgxgnpu/Physics-informed-vibe-coding/tree/main/FS-PIELM.
Xiong Xiong, Ruonan Zhai, Zheng Zeng +3
Jun 30, 2026cs.LG

SNAP-FM: Sparse Nonlinear Accelerated Projection for Physics-Constrained Generative Modeling

Generative models have emerged as scalable surrogates for physical simulation, yet they offer no guarantee that their outputs respect the conservation laws, boundary conditions, and nonlinear invariants that govern the underlying physics. Constrained sampling closes this gap, enforcing such constraints exactly at inference time without retraining, but at a computational cost: projection, correction and trajectory-optimization steps are repeated during sampling, with these steps becoming expensive for nonlinear constraints. Standard ML frameworks exacerbate this: their dense tensor algebra and limited sparse solver composability obscure the structure that physical constraints naturally induce, making efficient batched nonlinear optimization difficult to realize in practice. We address this bottleneck by exploiting the structure that sample-wise batching and local PDE couplings induce in the projection subproblems -- namely, block-sparse Jacobian and KKT systems -- exposing this structure using ExaModels.jl and solving the resulting sparse nonlinear programs with MadNLP.jl and GPU sparse factorization. Applied to Physics-Constrained Flow Matching (PCFM), on PDE benchmarks with linear, nonlinear, one-dimensional, and two-dimensional constraints, this approach accelerates nonlinear constraint projection while maintaining constraint satisfaction. These results show that sparse GPU nonlinear optimization is a practical foundation for constrained generative sampling in scientific machine learning.
Alaina Kolli, Theodoros Xenakis, Utkarsh Utkarsh +4
Jun 30, 2026math.NA

Domain-Decomposed Randomized Neural Networks for Partial Differential Equations in Unbounded Domains

Partial differential equations on unbounded domains are challenging because the exterior region must be represented without excessive truncation error. Truncation-based methods often require problem-dependent artificial boundary conditions, while global spectral bases may be inefficient for localized structures, irregular geometries, or solutions with different near-field and far-field behaviors. We propose a domain-decomposed randomized neural network framework for such problems. Different randomized subnetworks are assigned to different spatial regimes: a near-field subnetwork captures local and geometric features, whereas a far-field subnetwork represents exterior decay. The subnetworks are coupled by boundary and interface conditions, and only the output-layer coefficients are solved from linear least-squares systems arising from Petrov--Galerkin or collocation formulations. We develop a Petrov--Galerkin method for semi-unbounded elliptic problems and a collocation method for fully unbounded, perforated, and time-dependent problems. A conditional bounded-parameter approximation result is proved in a broken Sobolev norm, together with an error decomposition covering approximation, empirical-consistency/quadrature, and least-squares optimization errors. Numerical experiments for Poisson and time-dependent Schrödinger equations demonstrate the accuracy and flexibility of the proposed method.
Haixin Wang, Haoning Dang, Fei Wang +1
Jun 29, 2026cs.LG

Joint discovery of governing partial differential equations from multi-source datasets by competitive optimization

Discovering governing equations directly from observational data is a key step towards interpretable scientific machine learning. Current data-driven approaches typically operate on a single dataset, inherently limiting their performance when faced with restricted observations. In practice, multiple datasets are often available for the same physical system, distinguished only by distinct initial conditions or boundary configurations. Here, we present a competitive optimization framework designed to discover shared partial differential equations (PDEs) from multi-source datasets, termed MCO-PDE. The framework first trains independent neural surrogates for each data source, and then employs a soft-competitive weighting mechanism to dynamically assess dataset credibility and aggregate a consensus global coefficient. Integrated with a genetic algorithm for structural search, this approach simultaneously identifies the functional forms and parameters of the governing laws. We demonstrate that fusing as few as 50 observations per dataset across seven cases recovers canonical equations with high accuracy. The framework inherently handles two- and three-dimensional domains characterized by irregular boundaries and heterogeneous coefficients, and successfully extracts physically meaningful laws from real-world wave-tank experiments. Overall, this work establishes a promising route for automated scientific discovery via heterogeneous data fusion.
Hao Xu, Siyu Lou, Yuntian Chen +1
Jun 25, 2026cs.LG

Error-Conditioned Neural Solvers

Neural surrogate models offer fast approximate mappings from PDE parameters to solutions, but they typically treat solving as a purely statistical task: once trained, they struggle to correct their own constraint violations and extrapolate beyond the training distribution. Recent hybrid methods promote physical correctness by targeting the PDE residual via gradient descent or Gauss--Newton steps, but inherit the compute cost and instability of the underlying classical optimizers. We show, theoretically and empirically, that numerically minimizing the PDE residual can be an unreliable proxy for reconstruction accuracy in ill-conditioned systems, explaining why these methods often do not make accurate predictions despite achieving low residuals. We propose error-conditioned Neural Solvers (ENS), built on a different principle: rather than an optimization target, the PDE residual field is passed as a direct input to the network at each iteration, enabling it to read the spatial structure of its own errors and learn an update policy to iteratively correct its predictions. Across four PDE families, ENS attains the highest prediction accuracy in the large majority of settings, with gains reaching 10×10\times on turbulent Kolmogorov flow, while avoiding the expensive compute cost of hybrid methods. ENS's learned correction policy generalizes under distribution shift, including zero-shot parameter changes and cross-equation transfer, where its relative advantage is largest in the ill-conditioned regimes where residual minimization is least reliable. Project website: https://neuralsolver.github.io/.
Haina Jiang, Liam Wang, Peng-Chen Chen +4
Jun 25, 2026cs.LG

fTNN: a tensor neural network for fractional PDEs

We develop the fTNN, a deterministic tensor neural network subspace method for problems involving the fractional Laplacian on bounded domains, taking the fractional Poisson equation and time-dependent fractional advection-diffusion equation as typical representatives. The work employs a geometry-adapted integration split featuring a spatially dependent near-field radius, which decomposes the fractional Laplacian into three contributions: a singular near field, a regular interior far field, and an analytical exterior far field. Then the singular radial integrals are treated by Gauss-Jacobi quadrature, the regular radial integrals by Gauss quadrature, and the angular variables by deterministic angular quadrature, yielding a fully deterministic integration framework of the fractional Laplacian operator. To accurately resolve low-regularity solutions and the associated loss functional, we construct boundary-singularity-aware trial functions enriched with explicit boundary features, and propose two strategies for automatically selecting the leading exponent and evaluating the loss function from the singularity structure induced by the fractional operator, or jointly by the fractional operator and the source term. For time-dependent fractional PDEs, we design a spatiotemporally separable neural network that factorizes the time-space residual into a sum of low-dimensional temporal and spatial integrals, and we integrate this representation with an alternating neural network subspace optimization strategy for efficient training. Numerical experiments show that the proposed framework attains high accuracy on the tested benchmarks and improves substantially over existing fPINN and Monte Carlo baselines, particularly for problems with strong boundary singularities and long-time simulations.
Qingkui Ma, Hehu Xie, Xiaobo Yin
Jun 23, 2026cs.LG

A Zeroth-Order Deep Learning Method for Fully Nonlinear Parabolic Partial Differential Equations with Unknown Coefficients

High-dimensional partial differential equations (PDEs) with unknown coefficients arise widely in scientific machine learning, including continuous-time reinforcement learning, yet solving them efficiently in a data-driven way remains challenging. Existing deep learning solvers often rely on repeated automatic differentiation to evaluate differential operators, which can cause instability and amplify derivative errors in high dimensions, while probabilistic methods based on stochastic representations require explicit knowledge of the data-generating dynamics and therefore do not apply to black-box environments. We introduce two types of simulators as data-generating mechanisms, and take a ``representing-then-learning" approach that learns the solutions and their derivatives under settings where the underlying PDE operators are accessible only through simulations and pointwise evaluations. Our representation of derivatives relies on the zeroth-order derivative (ZOD) estimators derived from perturbed Monte Carlo trajectories. This fully model-free approach generates targets for the gradient and Hessian networks using only function evaluations. We provide a statistical learning analysis of the proposed approach, including a bias--variance tradeoff for ZODs. Assuming a standard contraction property of the underlying operator, we establish a non-asymptotic error bound that decomposes the total error into discretization error, approximation error, statistical error, and ZOD bias. Crucially, we derive the sample complexity of the learned representations in (weighted) Sobolev space, characterizing the error up to second-order derivatives. Numerical experiments illustrate the competitive performance of the method in moderate and high dimensions.
Yanwei Jia, Du Ouyang, Huyên Pham +1
Jun 23, 2026math.NA

Deep numerical schemes for systems of Ergodic BSDEs with applications to regime-switching forward utilities

In this paper, we introduce two neural-network-based numerical schemes for solving systems of coupled ergodic Backward Stochastic Differential Equations (eBSDEs), motivated by the approximation of optimal strategies within the framework of forward utilities in a regime-switching stochastic factor model. Our approach builds on the representation of such models through systems of eBSDEs introduced in [HLT20]. We first establish a link between the solution of the system of ergodic BSDEs and that of an associated multidimensional BSDE with random terminal time, given by the hitting time of the positive recurrent stochastic factor. Building on this representation, we introduce a locally additive deep learning scheme obtained by minimizing aggregated local error terms. We then present a new Deep Galerkin Method (DGM) inspired algorithm that minimizes the residual of the associated ergodic PDE system, relying on a representation of the ergodic cost. Finally, we apply this framework to regime-switching forward utilities in a stochastic factor model. We first derive a general consistency SPDE that characterizes regime-switching forward utilities and retrieve their representation with systems of ergodic BSDEs in the homothetic case. Numerical experiments demonstrate the performance of the proposed methods, with a particular focus on the impact on forward preferences of taking into account regime switches.
Guillaume Broux-Quemerais, Sarah Kaakai, Anis Matoussi +1
Jun 20, 2026cs.LG

Parameterized Representations via Implicit Stochastic Modulation for High-Dimensional and High-Order Neural PDE Solvers

Solving high-dimensional and high-order PDEs is challenged by the coupled growth of spatial dimensionality and derivative order. Recent stochastic derivative estimators reduce this cost by replacing full derivative tensors with randomized dimension or Taylor estimators, but they are mostly designed for fixed physical parameters and require retraining for each new parameter. We show that direct conditional parameterization of such solvers entangles physical parameters with the high-order automatic differentiation graph, causing extra memory growth and parameter-induced variance amplification. We propose Parameterized Representations via Implicit Stochastic Modulation (PRISM), a plug-and-play framework for parameterized high-dimensional and high-order stochastic neural PDE solvers. PRISM uses a hyper-generator to map physical parameters to affine modulators that scale and shift a purely spatial latent manifold, while keeping parameter branches value-connected but spatial-tangent-disconnected. This design preserves unbiased stochastic dimension and Taylor estimators, removes the parameter encoder from high-order spatial AD, and provides a variance-aware Lipschitz envelope over the parameter space. We prove parameterized unbiasedness, estimation-error bounds, and convergence under bounded stochastic variance. Experiments with PRISM-STDE and PRISM-SDGD on nonlinear parameterized PDEs show stable zero-shot generalization, reduced memory usage, and scalability up to 100,000 dimensions on a single GPU, with efficient low-rank SVD adaptation for unseen parameters.
Zhangyong Liang, Huanhuan Gao
Jun 19, 2026cs.LG

TF-SNO: Time-Frequency Gated Spectral Neural Operators for Learning Non-Stationary Partial Differential Equations

Non-stationary partial differential equations (PDEs) arise throughout scientific computing, where the dominant frequency content and energy distribution can drift over time. While efficient in PDE solving, many spectral neural operators apply a shared spectral response across rollout stages, leading to mismatch with time-varying spectra in non-stationary systems. To address this issue, we propose Time-Frequency Gated Spectral Neural Operator (TF-SNO), a state-adaptive framework with learnable time-frequency gating inside spectral blocks. TF-SNO extracts compact frequency-domain and physical-space statistics from the current state to generate modulation coefficients, enabling the spectral response to evolve with the dynamics. TF-SNO learns temporal variation implicitly from the evolving state without introducing an explicit time dimension or time embedding, keeping the modeling complexity low. We further embed the adaptive operator blocks to accurately capture the multi-scale features, thereby improving long-horizon stability. Experiments on six non-stationary PDE benchmarks in 1D and 2D demonstrate that TF-SNO significantly reduces prediction errors and improves robustness compared to strong baselines, with particularly clear gains in long rollout, suggesting the effectiveness of state-dependent spectral adaptation in modeling non-stationary physical systems.
Yitian Zhou, Chaoning Zhang, Zhenzhen Huang +8
Jun 19, 2026cs.AI

Negative Knowledge as Failure-aware Shared Memory for AutoResearch

AI-assisted research systems generate many failed attempts, but those failures rarely become a durable, shared knowledge asset. We propose a negative knowledge memory layer: a curator agent converts each failed attempt into a bounded, typed record in a shared bank, and a downstream research agent explicitly adopts or rejects those records before proposing its next experiment. We evaluate this layer in two settings: same-task retry on ScienceAgentBench and cross-task scientific research on two nonlinear math-physics PDE problems. The negative knowledge layer outperforms vanilla AutoResearch baselines while using fewer tokens; agents with the negative knowledge bank solve new tasks that all baselines fail to solve in PDE systems research. We also show that the previous negative knowledge bank can transfer and enhance AutoResearch on different PDE problems. These results suggest that structured negative knowledge is a knowledge asset that should be explicitly maintained in broader AI-engaged scientific research beyond a memory-compression or debugging aid, alongside positive findings, as a collective infrastructure for scientific memory. Code is available at https://github.com/hch-wang/Negative_Knowledge.
Hanchun Wang
Jun 18, 2026cs.LG

Agentic Symbolic Search: Characterizing PDEs Beyond Hand-crafted Expressions, Meshes, and Neural Networks

Mathematicians understand a PDE solution through mathematical structures rather than tables of computed values. Historically, this has been the product of mathematical analysis, carried out by hand for each problem individually. Neither numerical simulation nor neural networks produce those structures directly. We propose Agentic Symbolic Search (ASYS), a prior-guided framework in which an agent translates PDE theory, public problem constraints, and accumulated search experience into testable differentiable symbolic programs. The mathematical forms are refined under evolutionary search, while their continuous parameters are fit by gradient-based optimization. This makes the search an automated form of inductive-bias injection rather than blind symbolic regression. For problems with known analytical forms, ASYS recovers these forms naturally; for other problems, ASYS constructs analytical approximations which can guide mathematicians toward further analysis. In our experiments, across five problems spanning bounded dynamics, finite-time blow-up, and free-boundary focusing, ASYS produces interpretable representations, including a geometric interface formula for Allen-Cahn 2D dynamics and a nine-parameter contraction law for Keller-Segel chemotactic blow-up, in settings where no closed-form description was previously available. ASYS shows the possibility of a new paradigm for characterizing PDE solutions, beyond handcrafted analytical solutions, mesh-based numerical solutions, and neural network approximations.
Zongmin Yu, Liu Yang
Jun 18, 2026cs.LG

Neural network surrogates with uncertainty quantification for inverse problems in partial differential equations

Inverse problems for differential equations arise throughout science and engineering, where one seeks to infer unknown model parameters from noisy or incomplete observations. Traditional numerical methods for these problems are often computationally expensive, particularly in Bayesian settings where evaluating the likelihood becomes costly for complex forward models and high-dimensional parameter spaces. To address this challenge, we introduce DeepGaLA, a neural-network surrogate for differential equation solvers that provides uncertainty-aware predictions, reducing overconfident inference when training data are limited. To evaluate the fidelity of the surrogate-induced posterior approximations in practice, we show that a short run of delayed-acceptance Markov chain Monte Carlo can serve as an effective diagnostic. Across a range of numerical experiments, DeepGaLA delivers forward-model approximations with accuracy comparable to established Gaussian-process surrogates, while better maintaining efficiency as parameter dimension grows. Moreover, it can incorporate differential-equation constraints, including in nonlinear settings. Overall, these results indicate that uncertainty-quantified neural surrogates can enable scalable and reliable Bayesian inference for inverse problems in complex systems.
Christian Jimenez-Beltran, Aretha L. Teckentrup, Antonio Vergari +1
Jun 18, 2026cs.LG

Quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold networks for PDEs

We develop QCPIKAN, the first quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold network designed to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). Built upon Chebyshev-polynomial KAN layers and parameterized quantum circuits, this hybrid framework embeds physical constraints into the training loss to enforce physical consistency. Our theoretical investigations grounded in approximation theory prove that this design accelerates high-frequency error convergence to an exponential rate and effectively mitigates numerical dispersion. We validate the framework across three typical seepage scenarios in porous media, including single-phase flow, component transport and two-phase flow. Compared with existing quantum-classical physics-informed neural networks, QCPIKAN achieves superior performance in global prediction accuracy, local error control, dynamic evolution tracking and displacement front localization. This work provides a robust and efficient alternative for solving complex PDEs.
Xiang Rao, Yuxuan Shen
Jun 18, 2026math.NA

A fast direct solver based neural network for solving PDEs

The matrices arising from large scale NN-body problems can be efficiently represented using hierarchical matrices, whose key idea is that the admissible off-diagonal sub-matrices can be well approximated by low-rank matrices across a hierarchy of matrix partitions. HODLR (Hierarchical Off-Diagonal Low-Rank) matrices are a subclass of hierarchical matrices in which all off-diagonal submatrices at every level of a recursive binary partition are low-rank. In this article, we present a neural network that learns the inverse operation of HODLR matrices based on the fast direct solver for HODLR matrices developed by Ambikasaran and Darve (2013). We further extend the architecture to learn nonlinear solution operators associated with PDEs by replacing some of the linear layers with deep sub-networks. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed architecture by performing a comprehensive set of experiments that include (i) solving a linear problem such as the Fredholm integral equation of the second kind, (ii) solving PDEs such as the nonlinear Schrödinger equation, Burgers' equation, and the steady-state Darcy's flow equation, (iii) generalization study across varying parameter values, (iv) comparing the inference time of the proposed network with the run time of a classical numerical solver, and (v) comparing the proposed network with some of the existing neural operator learning networks.
Jashwanth Reddy Kadaru, Vaishnavi Gujjula
Jun 18, 2026cs.LG

Learning universal approximations for partial differential equations with Physics-Informed Broad Learning System

Partial differential equations (PDEs) play a central role in modeling complex physical, biological, and engineering systems. While traditional numerical solvers are robust, they often incur prohibitive computational costs due to mesh dependencies, whereas recent Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) offer a mesh-free alternative but frequently suffer from slow convergence and optimization instability. To bridge this gap, this article proposes the Physics-Informed Broad Learning System (PIBLS), a novel backpropagation-free framework that reformulates PDE solving as a direct least-squares optimization. We improved an algorithm within this framework to handle nonlinear PDEs efficiently and provide a rigorous mathematical proof establishing the universal approximation property of PIBLS for these equations. Experiments on linear and nonlinear PDEs demonstrate that PIBLS is one to three orders of magnitude faster than conventional PINNs while achieving significantly higher solution accuracy. This framework provides a computationally efficient paradigm for scientific machine learning, offering a practical, high-speed alternative for real-time simulation and design optimization tasks.
Zhiwen Yu, Derong Yang, Liujian Zhang +5
Jun 16, 2026math.NA

A Convex Quasilinearization Method for Solving Nonlinear PDEs with Physics-Informed Neural Networks

We present a numerical method for the forward solution of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) in which Bellman-Kalaba quasilinearization reduces the nonlinear problem to a sequence of linear subproblems, each discretized by collocation onto a trial space that is linear in its parameters and solved by a single direct linear least-squares QR factorization. The trial space, which we term Linear-in-Learnables (LiL), comprises representations whose trainable parameters enter linearly, including random-feature extreme learning machines, spectral polynomial bases, and trigonometric expansions, each implemented as a physics-informed neural network. The method thus replaces the nonconvex gradient-based training that limits standard PINNs with a convex per-step solve. We establish local Newton-Kantorovich convergence of the outer iteration to a residual-limited neighborhood under an explicit smallness condition, with the limiting accuracy governed by the best-approximation residual of the trial space rather than by an optimization tolerance. The method, denoted LiL-Q, is assessed on seven benchmarks spanning scalar nonlinear PDEs (Bratu, viscous Burgers, Buckley-Leverett), coupled systems (plane-strain elasticity and the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in two and three spatial dimensions), and steady-state Darcy flow with heterogeneous permeability. Across these problems, LiL-Q converges in single-digit outer iterations in most cases, even at the coarsest basis sizes and independent of the parameter count. When the exact solution lies in the span of the trial space, the method recovers it to machine precision in a single solve. On the Navier-Stokes benchmarks, it matches or exceeds published PINN solvers with up to two orders of magnitude fewer trainable parameters, without gradient-based optimization.
Gbenga T. Awojinrin, Abdul-Akeem Olawoyin, Rami M. Younis
Jun 16, 2026math.NA

Starter-Iterator Neural Operator: A Unified Architecture for High-Fidelity Forward and Inverse PDE Problems

Operator learning is an emerging field at the intersection of machine learning and scientific computing. By learning mappings between function spaces, neural operators provide data-driven surrogate models for families of partial differential equations (PDEs). Once trained, these models can evaluate solution operators efficiently, making them suitable for many-query applications such as real-time prediction and parameter sweeps. However, maintaining high approximation accuracy and stable long-term predictions remains challenging for complex forward and inverse problems. To address these challenges, we propose the Starter-Iterator Neural Operator (SINO), which incorporates the initialization and residual-correction structures of classical iterative solvers into neural operator learning. The frequency-domain Starter captures dominant global spectral features and provides an informed initial approximation, while the latent-space Iterator applies successive residual-based corrections to refine local and multiscale solution structures. Experiments on representative time-dependent PDEs, including the Navier-Stokes and acoustic wave equations, together with applications to image super-resolution and weather forecasting, show that SINO achieves competitive accuracy and stable performance across the benchmarks considered in this work.
Kuilin Qin, Lianfang Wang, Xu Sun +4
Jun 12, 2026cs.LG

Separable Neural Architectures as Physical World Models: from Mathematical Theory to Applications

This work introduces the Separable Neural Architecture (SNA), a function representational class combining neural approximation with tensor decomposition. The SNA decouples localized coordinate functions (atoms) from global interactions governed by a sparse, low-rank interaction object. This architecture possesses a compact and smooth inductive bias well-suited for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). When viewed as a Galerkin trial space under the variational SNA (VSNA) framework, the formulation satisfies classical variational guarantees under Lax-Milgram: well-posedness, quasi-optimality, convergence, and stability. In high-dimensional spatiotemporal--parametric PDEs, the VSNA mitigates the curse of dimensionality by scaling algebraically rather than exponentially. Exploiting an entirely factorized, tensor-native alternating least squares (ALS) optimization framework reduces this cost to linear in dimension. The VSNA is validated across elliptic, hyperbolic, and parabolic systems, demonstrating close alignment with predicted algebraic and spectral scaling rates. We showcase the SNA as a "solve once, query anywhere" physical world model via two engineering case studies: a 7D parametric manufacturing simulation and an experimental thermal-to-property inversion pipeline for Inconel 718. The VSNA executes a 1,000,000-query Monte Carlo sweep in 102s on a standard laptop CPU, yielding a 150,000x speedup over a full-grid finite element baseline hosted on an NVIDIA A100 GPU. It further enables real-time generative inverse-mode reconstructions under 100ms. These results demonstrate that the SNA serves as a compact mathematical substrate for continuous parameter manifolds to enable real-time inversion, optimization loops, and rapid uncertainty propagation.
Reza T Batley, Andrew Kichline, Sourav Saha
Jun 11, 2026cs.LG

How Much Memory Do We Need? Adaptive Memory Gate for Neural Operators

Neural operators have emerged as a powerful data-driven approach for solving time-dependent PDEs. Among recent advances, memory-augmented neural operators explicitly incorporate past states and have achieved remarkable performance under low-resolution observation settings. However, existing approaches apply a fixed memory weight regardless of observation conditions, such as resolution or physical parameters, limiting their adaptability. Our preliminary experiments reveal that optimal memory weight varies with resolution and viscosity, implying that a fixed memory weight cannot simultaneously optimize performance across diverse settings. We propose AMGFNO, which dynamically modulates memory weight through a learnable gate. On the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky and Burgers' equations, AMGFNO achieves 55-79% nRMSE reduction over at low resolution, with the learned gate value automatically decreasing from gˉ0.7\bar{g} \approx 0.7 to near-zero as resolution increases.
Jihyeon Hur, Yongseok Kwon, Min-Gi Jo +2
Jun 10, 2026cs.LG

Physics-Informed Neural Networks and Radial Basis Functions for PDEs with Dirac Delta Sources

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) are a machine learning method for solving forward and inverse Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). When applied to PDEs with Dirac delta functions in the forcing terms, boundary conditions, or initial conditions, PINNs require approximating them with smooth surrogate functions, a practice that can introduce significant modeling errors. In this work, we exploit the interpretation of PINNs as Residual Least Squares (RLS) methods and show that this perspective enables direct treatment of Dirac delta terms by integrating the weak-form equation. Among RLS formulations other than PINN, we focus on the Radial Basis Function (RBF) expansion (also known as a single-layer RBF Network). We show that while integrating out the Dirac delta in PINNs causes residuals to fail to converge to zero, RBF-RLS consistently provides good forward and inverse solutions to transport problems. We explain this finding using the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) theory. We test both approaches on linear PDEs that represent groundwater flow and transport in porous media and rivers. We solve inverse problems to fit synthetic data, noisy synthetic data, and real-world measurements.
Manuel Reyna, Alexandre Tartakovsky