PDE Surrogate Modeling
PDE: Partial Differential Equation
Momentum
32 papers in the last four weeks, up 146% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.
Latest papers 208
Accurate emulation of multi-scale physical systems governed by PDEs demands models that remain stable over long autoregressive rollouts while preserving fine-scale structures. Deterministic emulators produce overly-smoothed predictions, while generative approaches better capture details but are costly. Latent-space generative models have emerged as a compromise but with the additional cost of separately pre-trained autoencoders. We propose Wavelet Flow Matching (WFM), a novel generative emulator that overcomes current trade-offs between cost and skill by performing optimal-transport directly in the multi-scale wavelet space. Rather than learning a latent compression, WFM leverages the hierarchical structure of a U-Net to jointly predict transport velocities of a prescribed wavelet representation. On three challenging systems of chaotic fluid dynamics, WFM achieves superior long-horizon stability, accuracy and spectral coherence compared to state-of-the-art models. Our results clearly position the wavelet space as an effective training-free representation for generative emulation of complex physical dynamics.
Multi-Fidelity Flow Matching: Cascaded Refinement of PDE Solutions
The source distribution in conditional flow matching is a design parameter that can be calibrated to data, not a default isotropic prior. We exploit this in Multi-Fidelity Flow Matching (MFFM), a cascade refinement framework for parametric PDE solutions: the source is calibrated to the empirical low-to-high-fidelity residual scale with local Gaussian-blur correlation, and the velocity network is conditioned on the low-fidelity solution. Conditioning makes the residual refinement problem substantially easier than unconditional field generation, while residual-calibrated source noise improves the flow-matching training geometry. A multi-resolution cascade applies the same construction independently between adjacent fidelities. After level-wise flow-matching pretraining, we fine-tune the composed cascade end-to-end with a deterministic one-step rollout, which makes one velocity evaluation per cascade level the optimized operating point at inference. The result is a learned analog of multigrid refinement that reaches the finest grid in deterministic network evaluations per query. We validate MFFM on eight benchmarks: two super-resolution problems and six spatiotemporal forecasting tasks from PDEBench, The Well, and the FNO Navier--Stokes dataset.
A numerical study into neural network surrogate model performance for uncertainty propagation
Neural network surrogate models have emerged as a promising approach to model solution fields for a wide variety of boundary value problems encountered in physical modeling. Stochastic problems represent an area of particularly high interest because of the potential to significantly reduce the repeated evaluation of expensive forward models via traditional numerical solvers when conducting parametric analysis. However, many studies found in the literature primarily focus on the ability of neural network surrogate models to represent deterministic samples or mean field solutions and largely overlook surrogate model performance at the tails of the distribution. The present study examines in detail the ability of neural network surrogate models to capture the full distribution of solution fields over the entire probability space, while emphasis is placed at the tails of the distribution. Serving as a canonical problem is the heat conduction equation with a highly stochastic source term, inducing extremely large variation in the thermal solution field. Comparisons are made between a classic feed-forward fully connected network and a Deep Operator Network architecture, using both data-driven and physics-informed loss functions. Results show that the worst-case prediction errors are an order of magnitude larger than the mean field error, highlighting the importance of the outlier samples. The large errors associated with extreme samples result from the networks having to extrapolate beyond the bounds of the training data. A method for identifying these samples is presented along with a discussion of potential approaches to account of their errors. Among the models considered, the fully connected neural network trained using a weak form residual loss performs best in handling these extrapolated inputs, achieving the highest prediction accuracy for the numerically produced datasets.
When and Why Adversarial Training Improves PINNs: A Neural Tangent Kernel Perspective
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are powerful surrogates for differential equations but are notoriously difficult to train due to spectral bias, stiffness, and poor accuracy on high-frequency or multiscale solutions. Adversarial training based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) has recently gained surprisingly strong empirical results in improving training, but the underlying mechanisms remain elusive. To this end, we propose a new analysis framework for adversarially trained PINNs, based on the key observation of how the discriminator in GANs can influence the training dynamics of PINNs. The framework first provides a much needed theoretical grounding to why and when adversarial training is effective in PINNs, then presents a unified analysis of GANs variants in such training, and finally leads to a new, practical, efficient training algorithm for PINNs. Empirical results demonstrate that our method can significantly reduce the pathology of PINNs training, thereby providing better models with superior performances, often several magnitudes more accurate than alternative methods.
Breakeven complexity: A new perspective on neural partial differential equation solvers
Neural surrogate solvers of partial differential equations (PDEs) promise dramatic speedups over numerical methods, especially in scenarios requiring many solves. However, current accuracy-based evaluations do not fully consider two central issues: (1) neural solvers incur substantial up-front costs for data generation, training, and tuning; and (2) classical solvers can also generate low-fidelity solutions at a sufficiently low simulation cost. To explicitly account for these realities and fully incorporate end-to-end costs, we propose an evaluation framework centered on breakeven complexity, a metric that counts the forward solves before a learned solver is cost-effective relative to an error-equivalent traditional solver. To evaluate this measure, we apply scaling laws to determine how much training budget to allocate to data generation and discuss how to achieve smooth error-matching in diverse settings. We evaluate the breakeven complexity of multiple neural PDE solvers on three PDEs on 2D periodic domains from APEBench and a novel benchmark of flows past multiple obstacles generated by the GPU-native PyFR code. Among other findings, our results suggest that neural PDE solvers become more effective as problems get harder in terms of cost, dimension, rollout, physics regime (e.g. higher Reynolds number), etc.
Tadpole: Autoencoders as Foundation Models for 3D PDEs with Online Learning
We introduce Tadpole, a novel foundation model for three-dimensional partial differential equations (PDEs) that addresses key challenges in transferability, scalability to high dimensionality, and multi-functionality. Tadpole is pre-trained as an autoencoder on synthetic 3D PDE data generated by an efficient online data-generation framework. This enables large-scale, diverse training without storage or I/O overhead, demonstrated by scaling to an equivalent of hundreds of terabytes of training data. By autoencoding single-channel spatial crops, Tadpole learns rich and transferable representations across heterogeneous physical systems with varying numbers of state variables and spatial resolutions. Although pre-trained solely as an autoencoder, Tadpole can be efficiently applied for multiple downstream tasks beyond reconstruction, including dynamics learning and generative modeling. For dynamics learning, we propose a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy that integrates low-rank adaptation, latent-space transformations, and reintroduced skip connections, achieving accurate temporal modeling with a minimal number of trainable parameters. Tadpole demonstrates strong fine-tuning performance across various downstream tasks, highlighting its versatility and effectiveness as a foundation model for 3D PDE learning. Source code and pre-trained weights of Tadpole are available at https://github.com/tum-pbs/tadpole
Discovering Physical Directions in Weight Space: Composing Neural PDE Experts
Recent advances in neural operators have made partial differential equation (PDE) surrogate modeling increasingly scalable and transferable through large-scale pretraining and in-context adaptation. However, after a shared operator is fine-tuned to multiple regimes within a continuous physical family, it remains unclear whether the resulting weight-space updates merely form isolated regime experts or reveal reusable physical structure. Starting from a shared family anchor, we fine-tune low- and high-regime endpoint experts and show that their updates can be separated into a family-shared adaptation and a direction aligned with the underlying physical parameter. This separation reinterprets endpoint experts as finite-difference probes of a local physical direction in weight space, explaining why static averaging can interpolate between regimes but attenuates endpoint-specific physics. Building on this perspective, we propose Calibration-Conditioned Merge (CCM), a post-hoc coordinate readout method for composing neural PDE experts along this physical direction. Given physical metadata, a calibrated coordinate mapping, or a short observed rollout prefix, CCM infers the target composition coordinate and deploys a single merged checkpoint for the remaining rollout. We evaluate CCM on the reaction--diffusion system, viscosity-parameterized two-dimensional Navier--Stokes equations, and radial dam-break dynamics. Across these benchmarks, CCM achieves its strongest gains in extrapolative regimes, reducing out-of-distribution rollout error relative to the family anchor by 54.2%, 42.8%, and 13.8%, respectively. Further experiments across FNO scales, a DPOT-style backbone, and ablations confirm that endpoint fine-tuning is not arbitrary checkpoint drift, but reveals a calibratable physical direction for training-free transfer across PDE regimes.
Toward AI-Driven Digital Twins for Metropolitan Floods: A Conditional Latent Dynamics Network Surrogate of the Shallow Water Equations
AI-driven flood digital twins demand fast hydrodynamic surrogates for ensemble forecasting and observation assimilation. Yet even GPU-accelerated two-dimensional shallow water equation (SWE) solvers still require minutes per -hour run on a -million-active-cell metropolitan basin (the DesPlaines River basin at resolution), making such workloads prohibitive at native resolution. We present the Conditional Latent Dynamics Network (CLDNet): a low-dimensional latent neural ODE driven by rainfall, paired with a coordinate-based decoder conditioned on static terrain (elevation, slope, Manning roughness) that reconstructs depth and discharge at arbitrary query points. Pointwise decoding decouples memory from grid size and handles irregular watersheds natively, enabling metropolitan-scale training on a single compute node and direct queries at exact gauge coordinates without raster snapping. We evaluate CLDNet on a synthetic -cell Texas benchmark and on a new DesPlaines case study of real-rainfall StageIV storms whose reference simulator we validate against United States Geological Survey (USGS) gauges at the April2013 flood-of-record (Nash--Sutcliffe efficiency -- on mean-recentered water-surface elevation). CLDNet roughly halves the relative root-mean-squared error of an unconditional baseline, outperforms regular-grid VAE--ConvLSTM and FNO baselines on the Texas benchmark (both presuppose a Cartesian grid and do not apply to the irregular Des~Plaines watershed), reaches a critical success index of at the inundation threshold, and produces a full -hour basin-wide forecast in seconds -- a speedup.
U-HNO: A U-shaped Hybrid Neural Operator with Sparse-Point Adaptive Routing for Non-stationary PDE Dynamics
Solutions to many partial differential equations (PDEs) display coexisting smooth global transport and localized sharp features within a single trajectory: shock fronts, thin interfaces, and concentrated high-frequency content sit on top of slowly varying backgrounds. This poses a challenge for neural operators: Fourier-based architectures mix nonlocal interactions efficiently but tend to under-resolve localized non-smooth features, whereas spatially local architectures recover fine detail at the cost of long-range propagation and rollout stability. Existing hybrid operators paper over this tension with a fixed, spatially uniform fusion that forces the same trade-off everywhere. We propose U-HNO, a U-shaped hybrid neural operator whose central design is Sparse-Point Adaptive Routing (SPAR): at every spatial location, a per-pixel hard mask selects whether the global Fourier branch or the local multi-scale Gaussian branch should dominate, and the sparsity ratio is a function of the local contrast of the routing signal, so smooth and shock-aligned regions receive different mixtures of global and local computation. SPAR is embedded in a hierarchical encoder-bottleneck-decoder backbone with skip connections so that the dual branches and the gate operate at every resolution. Training combines pointwise supervision with a finite-difference H^1 gradient term and a band-wise spectral consistency regularizer. Across benchmarks spanning 1D Burgers, Kuramoto-Sivashinsky, KdV, 2D advection, Allen-Cahn, Navier-Stokes, Darcy flow, and 3D transonic compressible Navier-Stokes from PDEBench, U-HNO achieves state-of-the-art rollout accuracy on the majority of tasks in both relative L^2 and H^1 metrics, with the largest gains on problems dominated by sharp localized features. Ablations show that removing any single component substantially degrades rollout error.
Stable Long-Horizon PDE Forecasting via Latent Structured Spectral Propagators
Long-horizon forecasting of time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) is critical for characterizing the sustained evolution of physical systems. While neural operators have emerged as efficient surrogates, they typically learn implicit finite-time transitions from discrete observations. When deployed autoregressively, such propagators often suffer from rapid error accumulation and dynamic drift. To address this, we propose a neural forecasting framework that reformulates PDE rollout as learning a Structured Spectral Propagator (SSP) in a propagation-oriented latent space. Following an analysis-propagation-synthesis design, our framework: (i) maps physical states into a shared, time-consistent spatial representation; (ii) projects this space into a compact propagation state to isolate recurrent dynamics from fine-grained spatial details, thereby decoupling reconstruction fidelity from rollout regularity; and (iii) evolves retained spectral modes using a frequency-conditioned linear backbone complemented by a nonlinear spectral closure to account for truncated interactions. This explicit structuring endows the propagator with a strong inductive bias for coherent modal evolution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SSP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing relative errors by up to 48.9% and exhibiting improved stability in temporal extrapolation beyond the supervised horizon.
HS-FNO: History-Space Fourier Neural Operator for Non-Markovian Partial Differential Equations
Neural operators provide fast surrogate models for time-dependent partial differential equations, but their standard autoregressive use usually assumes that the instantaneous field is a complete state. This assumption fails for delay equations, distributed-memory systems, and other non-Markovian dynamics: two trajectories may agree at time and nevertheless have different futures because their histories differ. We introduce the History-Space Fourier Neural Operator (HS-FNO), a neural operator for delay and memory-driven PDEs formulated on the lifted state , . The key computational step is to decompose one history-state update into a learned predictor for the newly exposed future slice and an exact shift-append transport for the portion of the history window already known from the previous state. This avoids learning deterministic history coordinates, reduces the learned output dimension, and enforces the natural discrete history update. We test HS-FNO on five benchmark families covering delayed reaction--diffusion, spatial epidemiology, nonlocal neural-field dynamics, delayed waves, and distributed-memory closures. Across ten random seeds, HS-FNO attains the lowest aggregate one-step, history-space, and rollout errors among the principal baselines. The largest gain occurs in autoregressive prediction, where aggregate rollout error decreases from , , and for current-state, lag-stack, and unconstrained history-to-history operators, respectively, to . The same model uses fewer parameters than unconstrained history prediction. These results indicate that enforcing the discrete shift structure of history-state evolution is an effective inductive bias for non-Markovian PDE surrogate modeling.
Finite Volume-Informed Neural Network Framework for 2D Shallow Water Equations: Rugged Loss Landscapes and the Importance of Data Guidance
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are a simple surrogate-modelling paradigm for partial differential equations, but their standard strong-form residual formulation is ill suited to the shallow water equations (SWE). It cannot enforce local conservation, handle discontinuities, or leverage the boundary-conforming unstructured meshes used in real-world applications. We introduce ``Data-Guided FVM-PINN'', a framework that replaces the strong-form residual with a differentiable, well-balanced Roe Riemann-solver finite-volume (FVM) loss evaluated on unstructured meshes. The major finding is that physics-only FVM-PINN training often fails on realistic 2D problems: the network collapses to a trivial low-momentum state that nearly satisfies the FVM-PINN residual but bears no resemblance to the true flow. A loss-landscape diagnostic shows that the FVM-PINN loss at zero momentum is only about larger than at the trained solution, a shallow basin that an ordinary optimizer falls into; adding even sparse data turns this into a separation, breaking the degeneracy. On a 2D block-in-channel benchmark, just random velocity measurements drop the velocity-field error by versus physics-only; measurements still deliver a reduction. A controlled ablation isolates the contribution of the FVM-PINN loss: it reduces velocity-field by \sim$$23\% in the sparse-data regime and is essentially neutral when dense reference data is available. On a real-world Savannah River reach ( cells, ~s simulation, five Manning zones), the framework constructs an accurate surrogate from SRH-2D anchor data, with time-window decomposition reducing error monotonically via progressive initial-condition handoff.
Bridging Spectral Operator Learning and U-Net Hierarchies: SpectraNet for Stable Autoregressive PDE Surrogates
Neural operators for time-dependent PDEs face a structural tension: spectral architectures (FNO and descendants) inherit exponential rollout-error growth from their one-step Lipschitz constant, while hierarchical U-Net operators trade resolution invariance for multi-scale detail. We introduce SpectraNet, an autoregressive neural operator that composes truncated spectral convolutions inside a U-Net hierarchy with a Residual-Target Spectral Block trained under a Semigroup-Consistency Loss. The residual-target parametrization replaces L^T stability blow-up with linear T*delta drift, and the spectral path's parameter count is Theta(L w^2 M^2), independent of grid N. Under a single unified protocol against 16 published neural-operator baselines on Navier-Stokes nu=1e-5 at 64x64, SpectraNet reaches test relative L2 = 0.0822 at 2.04M parameters -- 2.33x fewer than canonical FNO at ~20% lower error -- and wins five of six rows in a cross-PDE comparison against FNO (NS at nu in {1e-4, 1e-3}, PDEBench Shallow-Water 2D and Diffusion-Reaction, with the Active-Matter row going to FNO inside its seed spread). Trained from scratch at native 128^2 under the same protocol, SpectraNet improves to 0.0724 while FNO regresses to 0.3080. Free rollout stays bounded for T=100 where FNO diverges across all 200 test trajectories. On consumer CPU at B=1, SpectraNet runs sub-200ms while the full-attention Transformer that wins raw L2 pays ~60x latency; we do not claim to beat that Transformer on raw L2, only to dominate the lightweight (<=5M parameter, sub-200ms CPU) Pareto frontier. Source code: https://github.com/Enrikkk/spectranet
PACT: Peak-Aware Cross-Attention Graph Transformers for Efficient Storm-Surge Emulation
Accurate and efficient storm-surge emulation is essential for coastal hazard assessment, yet high-fidelity hydrodynamic models remain too expensive for large scenario ensembles and rapid evaluation under heterogeneous climate forcings. We present PACT, a peak-aware cross-attention graph transformer for efficient station-level storm-surge prediction from atmospheric forcing fields. PACT represents each forcing patch as a graph, encodes spatial structure with GraphSAGE, and uses a learned station query to aggregate node information through cross-attention rather than uniform pooling. A Transformer encoder models temporal dependence across the forcing history, and a horizon-query decoder generates lead-specific forecasts from a shared temporal memory. To better capture extreme events, we introduce a peak-aware learning strategy that couples a lightweight auxiliary peak-aware head with a tailored training objective, including a tail-focused loss on peak-dominated samples and a horizon-wise slope regularizer to encourage coherent multi-step evolution. Across multiple tide-gauge stations along the US Northeast coast, PACT outperforms a strong spatio-temporal graph neural network baseline in both RMSE and MAE. Diagnostics show improved peak fidelity and tail preservation for reanalysis and most CMIP6 datasets. PACT is also computationally efficient, requiring about 3.5~s to generate a full winter-season surge trajectory for one year after training. Under distribution shift across five CMIP6 forcings, PACT transfers well within the CMIP6 family but degrades markedly when transferring from reanalysis to climate-model forcings, highlighting a persistent reanalysis--GCM gap.
Can We Formally Verify Neural PDE Surrogates? SMT Compilation of Small Fourier Neural Operators
Fourier Neural Operators (FNOs) can greatly accelerate PDE simulation, but they are often used without formal guarantees that they preserve basic physical structure. We show that, once the trained weights and grid are fixed, the spectral convolution in an FNO is a linear map. As a result, the full forward pass is piecewise-linear and can be represented exactly in Z3's linear real arithmetic. We study two encodings. The exact encoding compiles the spectral convolution into a dense matrix multiplication, which is sound for both proofs and counterexamples. The lighter frozen encoding replaces the spectral path with a constant, making it faster but approximate. On 10 small FNO surrogates for 1D advection-diffusion-reaction (85 to 117 parameters, grids 8 to 32), the exact encoding gives 2 sound positivity proofs on linear (ReLU-free) models, 5 sound positivity counterexamples, and 10 sound mass-violation counterexamples; the remaining 3 positivity queries on ReLU models time out. For mass non-increase, Z3 finds worse counterexamples than both gradient-based falsification and Monte Carlo on 7 of 10 models. The frozen encoding scales to grid size 64 with sub-second positivity checks, but it no longer provides certificates for the original FNO. Overall, the results make the soundness--scalability tradeoff explicit and point to what is needed for formal verification of production-scale neural operators.
Physics-Informed Neural PDE Solvers via Spatio-Temporal MeanFlow
Deep learning paradigms, such as PINNs and neural operators, have significantly advanced the solving of PDEs. However, they often struggle to capture the continuous integral nature of physical systems, relying either on pointwise residuals that ignore the integral perspective or on pre-discretized temporal grids. Drawing inspiration from MeanFlow, a continuous-time integrator recently developed to efficiently solve generative ODEs, we introduce Spatio-Temporal MeanFlow, which functions as a novel PDE solver learning the finite-interval evolution of physical states. By substituting the generative velocity field with the physical PDE operator, we transform multi-step numerical integration into an efficient prediction with a freely controllable integration length. Crucially, we extend the original MeanFlow constraint from the temporal to the spatio-temporal domain, coupling time evolution with spatial consistency. This yields a unified framework naturally accommodating both time-dependent and stationary PDEs. Comprehensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves superior accuracy and inference efficiency over representative baselines. Furthermore, the proposed integral constraint enables excellent generalization to out-of-distribution initial conditions and varying spatial resolutions.
A meshfree exterior calculus for generalizable and data-efficient learning of physics from point clouds
We introduce a meshfree exterior calculus (MEEC) for learning structure-preserving descriptions of physics on point clouds, and use it to build MEEC-Net, a data-efficient surrogate that transfers across resolutions, geometries, and physical parameters. MEEC equips an -ball graph with virtual node and edge measures via a single sparse Schur complement solve; the resulting complex satisfies discrete conservation exactly, is end-to-end differentiable in the point positions, and exposes a direct geometry-to-physics link without the mesh-generation step required by conventional structure-preserving discretizations. MEEC-Net learns unknown physics as a shared edge-wise flux law in an SO()-invariant local frame, so the same kernel produces compatible fluxes on any point cloud whose features lie in the training range. We prove a solution-error bound that splits into discretization and kernel-approximation terms which is independent of problem geometry, explaining the observed transfer from very few examples. We show that single-solution training transfers to unseen geometries, boundary conditions, and physical parameters. On five canonical PDE benchmarks MEEC-Net achieves 1-2 orders of magnitude lower out-of-distribution error than baseline neural-operator approaches. On the SimJEB structural-bracket benchmark it achieves competitive error while using substantially fewer training geometries.
Accelerated and data-efficient flow prediction in stirred tanks via physics-informed learning
The simulation of fluid flows is computationally expensive due to the complexity of its governing partial differential equations. Machine learning models offer a potential surrogate, enabling learning from simulations and significantly faster predictions of flow fields. However, these models require large training datasets, which introduces a trade-off between dataset generation cost and predictive accuracy. In this work, we investigate the relationship between the size of the training-set and accuracy of the prediction when learning steady flow fields in an industrial-scale stirred vessel. A data set of steady flows is generated using Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) simulations in a range of realistic operating conditions, including impeller speeds and liquid heights. We train implicit neural representations of flow fields and compare purely data-driven and constrained variants. Model performance is evaluated using global mean squared error (MSE), qualitative spatial comparisons of predicted and reference flow fields, and tracer transport simulations. We find that the prediction error decreases monotonically with increasing training data, but also that it exhibits clear diminishing returns beyond moderate dataset sizes. Physics-based constraints significantly improve accuracy and reduce variability across training runs in low-data regimes, and they lead to more stable tracer-transport behavior. Furthermore, reasonable interpolation can be achieved over different impeller speeds and liquid heights. However, these benefits come with an increase in the complexity of training, and their relative advantage diminishes as the training set grows.
Learned Lagrangian Models of PDEs via Euler-Lagrange Residual Minimization
We present the first method to directly use a learned continuous Lagrangian to forecast the dynamics of systems governed by partial differential equations, exploiting the inherent conservative structure to achieve stable long-range predictions. We develop an optimization-based integrator that minimizes the squared Euler--Lagrange residual via a mesh-free near-symplectic construction on local space-time patches. Different from integrators for analytical models, integrators for learned models should decouple model error (phase error) from integration error (conservation error). By relying on optimization rather than time-stepping, we bypass the global coupling inherent to fixed discretizations, which slows time- and space-stepping and complicates learning. Our method scales linearly with domain size via Jacobi iteration, and places no structural requirements on the learned network, allowing it to be coupled with existing physics-guided machine learning (ML) methods. We validate our approach on a learned representation of a double pendulum, a one-dimensional wave equation, and a two-dimensional wave equation. Our method achieves error comparable to classical symplectic methods while generalizing to spatially varying dynamics and arbitrary boundary conditions without retraining.
AeroJEPA: Learning Semantic Latent Representations for Scalable 3D Aerodynamic Field Modeling
High-fidelity CFD is essential for aerodynamic design, but repeated simulations are computationally expensive, motivating surrogate models for rapid evaluation across geometries and operating conditions. Most existing surrogates are designed for direct field regression, requiring the evaluation of millions of field points even when only an aerodynamic quantity or a localized region is needed, while their internal representations are not intended for direct use in downstream tasks. We introduce AeroJEPA, a framework inspired by joint-embedding predictive architectures that represents the problem in two distinct latent spaces: context tokens encode geometry, while predicted tokens encode the aerodynamic state. Both representations remain directly accessible for downstream tasks, such as linear readouts of design variables and aerodynamic quantities without decoding and integrating the full field. When spatial detail is needed, a continuous implicit decoder evaluates the field only at the requested coordinates while reusing the encoded geometry. We evaluate AeroJEPA on HiLiftAeroML, with multi-million-point fields, and SuperWing, which spans a broad family of transonic wings. Compared with state-of-the-art direct-regression surrogates, AeroJEPA trades peak full-field accuracy for compact, reusable representations. In our selective-decoding experiment, however, AeroJEPA substantially outperforms the evaluated direct-regression surrogates while avoiding predictions over the remainder of the aircraft. The learned representations further support controlled interpolation, concept-vector arithmetic, and preliminary constrained latent-space optimization. These results show how predictive representations can support aerodynamic analysis with or without full-field reconstruction.
Towards Scalable One-Step Generative Modeling for Autoregressive Dynamical System Forecasting
Fast surrogate modeling for high-dimensional physical dynamics requires more than low short-term error: useful models must roll out efficiently while preserving the statistical structure of long trajectories. Neural operators provide inexpensive autoregressive forecasts but can drift in turbulent regimes, whereas rolling diffusion and latent generative surrogates can represent stochastic transitions at the cost of multi-step denoising, noise-schedule design, or auxiliary compression models. We propose MeanFlow Long-term Invariant Spatiotemporal Consistency Autoregressive Models (MeLISA), a latent-free autoregressive generative surrogate built on pixel-space MeanFlow. MeLISA defines a blockwise stochastic transition kernel that generates each forecast block with a single model evaluation, avoiding latent encoders and iterative diffusion solvers at inference time. To stabilize long-horizon rollouts, MeLISA combines a Window-Consistency MeanFlow objective that learns conditional spatiotemporal generation from partially observed temporal windows with a Time Increment Consistency loss that constrains multi-lag finite increments and targets temporal-correlation structure. We evaluate MeLISA with compact UNet and scalable DiT backbones on two high-resolution benchmarks, extended 2D Kolmogorov flow at and turbulent channel-flow slice at . MeLISA outperforms neural-operator baselines on short-term forecasting accuracy and long-horizon statistical metrics, including energy spectra, turbulent kinetic energy, and mixing-rate-related dynamics, while achieving inference speeds comparable to, and in some cases faster than, neural operators. Compact 3.7-5.7M-parameter variants already deliver strong parameter efficiency, and DiT variants provide a scalable path up to 150M parameters. Overall, MeLISA benefits both rollout efficiency and long-horizon statistical accuracy.
Posterior-First Neural PDE Simulation: Inferring Hidden Problem State from a Single Field
Neural PDE simulators often receive only a single observed field at deployment. In this setting, a field-to-future predictor can collapse distinct latent problem states into the same deterministic interface, losing the ambiguity needed for reliable rollout and downstream decisions. We propose posterior-first neural PDE simulation: first infer a posterior over the minimal task-sufficient problem state, then condition prediction on that posterior. The resulting theory connects the object, the learning target, and the failure mode: Bayes downstream values factor through this posterior, refinement labels make it learnable by proper scoring rules, and deterministic collapse incurs an ambiguity barrier whenever the true posterior is non-Dirac. Synthetic exact-ambiguity experiments show that point-versus-posterior gaps track the predicted barrier. On metadata-hidden PDEBench tasks, posterior recovery reduces pooled rollout nRMSE from 0.175 to 0.132, closing 59.4% of the direct-to-oracle gap. These results suggest that single-observation neural PDE simulation should be posterior-first rather than monolithic field-to-future prediction.
Variational Matrix-Learning Fourier Networks for Parametric Multiphysics Surrogates
Multiphysics simulation is critical for system-technology co-optimization (STCO) in chiplet-based design, but repeated finite-element solutions of PDE-governed problems are computationally expensive in parametric design exploration. This paper proposes a variational matrix-learning Fourier network (VMLFN) for efficient parametric multiphysics surrogate modeling. VMLFN constructs a log-space sine neural representation with randomly sampled spectral frequencies, frequency-dependent decay regulation, and embedded Dirichlet boundary conditions. With fixed hidden-layer parameters, the output-layer weights are determined by reformulating the governing PDEs into variational weak forms and enforcing the stationarity condition of the resulting energy functional. This converts physics-informed training into a linear matrix-solving problem, requiring only first-order derivatives and avoiding both high-order automatic differentiation and penalty-coefficient tuning. A heuristic frequency-scanning algorithm is further introduced to select a problem-adaptive maximum frequency that covers the dominant spectral range of the target problem. The proposed method is validated on heat conduction, solid mechanics, and Helmholtz wave propagation problems. Results from five benchmark cases demonstrate that VMLFN delivers accurate full-field predictions with substantial speedup over conventional physics-informed neural networks and repeated finite-element simulations.
Mesh Based Simulations with Spatial and Temporal awareness
Machine Learning surrogates for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), particularly Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Transformers, have become a new important approach for accelerating physics simulations. However, we identify a critical bottleneck in the field: while architectures have advanced significantly, the common underlying training paradigms remain bound to naive assumptions, such as node-wise supervision and explicit Euler time-stepping. These legacy choices ignore the stiff dynamics and local flux continuity inherent to numerous partial differential equations resolution methods, such as Finite Element, Difference, or Volume (FEM). In this work, we propose a unified framework to bridge the gap between geometric deep learning and rigorous numerical analysis. We introduce three key innovations: (1) Multi Node Prediction, a stencil-level objective that predicts field values for a node's full local topology, enforcing spatial derivative consistency; (2) Temporal Correction, replacing unstable explicit schemes with a predictor-corrector via temporal Cross-Attention; and (3) Geometric Inductive Biases, leveraging 3D Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE) to robustly capture rotational symmetries in unstructured meshes. We evaluate this framework across three architectures (MeshGraphNet, Transolver, and a Transformer) on diverse physics datasets. Our approach yields consistent improvements in accuracy and stability, particularly in long-horizon rollouts, while producing latent representations that generalize to unseen subtasks such as Wall Shear Stress or Pressure prediction. Code is available at https://github.com/DonsetPG/graph-physics.
Adaptation of AI-accelerated CFD Simulations to the IPU platform
Intelligence Processing Units (IPU) have proven useful for many AI applications. In this paper, we evaluate them within the emerging field of \emph{AI for simulation}, where traditional numerical simulations are supported by artificial intelligence approaches. We focus specifically on a program for training machine learning models supporting a \emph{computational fluid dynamics} application. We use custom TensorFlow provided by the Poplar SDK to adapt the program for the IPU-POD16 platform and investigate its ease of use and performance scalability. Training a model on data from OpenFOAM simulations allows us to get accurate simulation state predictions in test time. We show how to utilize the \emph{popdist} library to overcome a performance bottleneck in feeding training data to the IPU on the host side, achieving up to 34% speedup. Due to communication overheads, using data parallelism to utilize two IPUs instead of one does not improve the throughput. However, once the intra-IPU costs have been paid, the hardware capabilities for inter-IPU communication allow for good scalability. Increasing the number of IPUs from 2 to 16 improves the throughput from 560.8 to 2805.8 samples/s.
An ALE-Consistent Graph Neural Operator-Transformer Framework for Fluid-Structure Interaction
We propose an arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE)-consistent machine learning framework for long-term fluid-structure interaction (FSI) prediction on deforming unstructured meshes. Specifically, the fluid dynamics are modeled by a surrogate that combines a graph neural operator (GNO) with a vision Transformer (ViT) for spatiotemporal prediction, while a lightweight long short-term memory (LSTM) network predicts structural kinematics at the interface. The two surrogates are coupled through a standard partitioned procedure. Most importantly, kinematic compatibility at the moving interface is enforced via an ALE-consistent boundary-correction step that updates the fluid-side interface velocity with the predicted structural velocity at each coupling update, thereby improving near-interface accuracy and long-term rollout stability. To mitigate autoregressive error accumulation, a two-stage training strategy is adopted, consisting of single-step supervised pretraining followed by long-term autoregressive fine-tuning. The proposed framework is validated on the benchmark problem of a flexible beam vibration in the wake of a cylinder. Results demonstrate accurate phase-consistent predictions over long rollouts and robust generalization under inlet-profile variations in both interpolation and extrapolation settings. Systematic ablation studies further assess the respective contributions of the ViT module, ALE-consistent boundary correction, and long-term training to predictive accuracy and rollout robustness.
Acceleration of horizontal numerical advection for atmospheric modeling through surrogate modeling with temporal coarse-graining
Machine-learned surrogate modeling of advection may accelerate geoscientific models, but existing approaches have either achieved limited speedup or have sacrificed spatial resolution compared to the model they are trained to emulate. We developed a machine-learned solver that speeds up advection simulations without sacrificing spatial resolution through the use of temporal coarse-graining, where the model is trained to take larger integration steps than dictated by the Courant-Friedrich-Lewy (CFL) condition. Our solver framework includes a convolutional neural network that takes concentrations and CFL numbers as inputs and outputs mass flux. Our solvers emulate 10-day ground-level horizontal advection simulations with r values against the baseline ranging from 0.60--0.98 with temporal coarsening factors of 4 to 32 times the baseline integration time step. Speed increases and accuracy decreases with increased coarsening, with in accuracy lost for every factor of 10 gained in speed, reaching a maximum 92 speedup while maintaining . We deliberately trained our solvers only on January ground-level wind data to examine their ability to generalize across seasons and vertical heights. The 4-coarsened learned solver successfully reproduces simulations over 72 vertical levels. The 8--16 solvers (but not 32) emulate most vertical levels. The learned solvers also generalize well across seasons, except for instabilities in June and October. With additional fine-tuning, these learned solvers could be appropriate for operational use where trading accuracy for speed could be advantageous, such as in screening tools, in ensemble simulations, or with data assimilation.
Learning Neural Operator Surrogates for the Black Hole Accretion Code
General-relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GR-MHD) simulations are essential for studying black hole accretion, relativistic jets, and magnetic reconnection, yet their computational cost severely limits systematic parameter exploration. We investigate neural operator surrogates for two astrophysically relevant simulation scenarios produced by the Black Hole Accretion Code (\texttt{BHAC}). First, a Physics Informed Fourier Neural Operator (PINO) is trained on the special-relativistic resistive MHD (SRRMHD) evolution of the Orszag-Tang vortex over a range of resistivities spanning the Sweet-Parker and fast reconnection regimes. By embedding the governing equations as an additional loss term evaluated at finer temporal resolution than the available data supervision, the model learns dynamics at time steps where no simulation data is provided, enabling recovery of plasmoid formation that a data-only baseline trained on the same sparse snapshots fails to reproduce. To our knowledge, the present work is the first application of a physics informed neural operator to special relativistic resistive MHD, and the first to investigate the capability of such models to resolve plasmoid formation in SRRMHD. In a second line of investigation, an OFormer-style Transformer Neural Operator is trained on the evolution of spine-sheath relativistic jets created with \texttt{BHAC}, in special-relativistic MHD (SRMHD). The model is directly applied on the adaptive mesh, highlighting the need for linear attention due to long sequences. The neural surrogate model is capable of capturing most of the major details, especially in early predictions. To our knowledge, this constitutes the first application of a neural operator directly on a high resolution adaptive mesh refinement grid in the context of MHD simulations.
Multi-scale Dynamic Wake Modeling and Prediction of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines via Physics-Informed Neural Networks and Fourier Neural Operators
Multi-scale dynamic wake modeling and prediction are essential for the real-time control and optimization of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs). In this study, wakes of FOWTs under coupled surge and pitch motions across a range of Strouhal numbers (St), which can induce wake meandering, are modeled via two novel deep-learning frameworks: physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and Fourier neural operators (FNOs). The high-fidelity dataset is obtained from large-eddy simulations with the actuator line model (LES-AL). The results demonstrate that the dominant large-scale dynamic structures, such as meandering, can be well modeled by both frameworks; however, FNOs exhibit significant advantages over the PINN model in terms of efficiency (8-fold computational speedup and 40-fold faster convergence), long-term predictive capability, and multi-scale coherent structural fidelity. Furthermore, the wakes predicted by the PINN model exhibit a smoothing effect that limits the resolution of high-frequency coherent structures and underestimates turbulent fluctuations in both the wake center and half-width. Spectral analysis reveals that FNOs resolve the primary meandering frequency (where Stp denotes the frequency induced by the coupled surge and pitch motions), its corresponding higher-order harmonics (2Stp, 3Stp), and the energy cascade. In contrast, the energy cascade in the PINN predictions dissipates more rapidly in the high-frequency regime (St > 1.0). Additionally, the pre-multiplied power spectral density indicates that the energy contained in meandering and the corresponding harmonic frequencies modeled by PINNs is relatively low compared to that in CFD and FNOs. These findings suggest that FNOs are promising for the high-fidelity, real-time modeling of FOWT wakes.
GeoFunFlow-3D: A Physics-Guided Generative Flow Matching Framework for High-Fidelity 3D Aerodynamic Inference over Complex Geometries
Deep generative models and neural operators have demonstrated significant potential for 3D aerodynamic inference. However, they often face inherent challenges in maintaining physical consistency and preserving high-frequency features, primarily due to spectral bias and gradient conflicts within the governing equations. To address these issues, we propose GeoFunFlow-3D, a physics-guided generative flow matching framework. Temporally, we utilize optimal transport theory to build the generation path, ensuring stable training dynamics. Spectrally, we introduce a high-order discrete engine without automatic differentiation (No-AD) to reduce gradient stiffness. Spatially, a topology-aware super-resolution module (SATO) is employed to rigorously enforce physical laws in localized regions such as shock waves. We evaluated our framework on complex industrial datasets. On the BlendedNet dataset, the model successfully avoids mode collapse even under sparse data conditions. For the NASA Rotor37 test, it accurately captures 3D detached shock structures. Compared to conventional operators, GeoFunFlow-3D significantly improves accuracy, reducing the pressure field error (RRMSE) to 0.0215 while maintaining competitive inference efficiency. Ultimately, this work provides a reliable, geometry-driven approach for generating high-dimensional fluid fields.