Learning Physical Operators using Neural Operators

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gopakumar, Vignesh, Gray, Ander, Giles, Dan, Zanisi, Lorenzo, Kusner, Matt J., Betcke, Timo, Pamela, Stanislas, Deisenroth, Marc Peter
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911564128321536
author Gopakumar, Vignesh
Gray, Ander
Giles, Dan
Zanisi, Lorenzo
Kusner, Matt J.
Betcke, Timo
Pamela, Stanislas
Deisenroth, Marc Peter
author_facet Gopakumar, Vignesh
Gray, Ander
Giles, Dan
Zanisi, Lorenzo
Kusner, Matt J.
Betcke, Timo
Pamela, Stanislas
Deisenroth, Marc Peter
contents Neural operators have emerged as promising surrogate models for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), but struggle to generalise beyond training distributions and are often constrained to a fixed temporal discretisation. This work introduces a physics-informed training framework that addresses these limitations by decomposing PDEs using operator splitting methods, training separate neural operators to learn individual non-linear physical operators while approximating linear operators with fixed finite-difference convolutions. This modular mixture-of-experts architecture enables generalisation to novel physical regimes by explicitly encoding the underlying operator structure. We formulate the modelling task as a neural ordinary differential equation (ODE) where these learned operators constitute the right-hand side, enabling continuous-in-time predictions through standard ODE solvers and implicitly enforcing PDE constraints. Demonstrated on incompressible and compressible Navier--Stokes equations, our approach achieves better convergence and superior performance when generalising to unseen physics. The method remains parameter-efficient, enabling temporal extrapolation beyond training horizons, and provides interpretable components whose behaviour can be verified against known physics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_23113
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Physical Operators using Neural Operators
Gopakumar, Vignesh
Gray, Ander
Giles, Dan
Zanisi, Lorenzo
Kusner, Matt J.
Betcke, Timo
Pamela, Stanislas
Deisenroth, Marc Peter
Machine Learning
Neural operators have emerged as promising surrogate models for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), but struggle to generalise beyond training distributions and are often constrained to a fixed temporal discretisation. This work introduces a physics-informed training framework that addresses these limitations by decomposing PDEs using operator splitting methods, training separate neural operators to learn individual non-linear physical operators while approximating linear operators with fixed finite-difference convolutions. This modular mixture-of-experts architecture enables generalisation to novel physical regimes by explicitly encoding the underlying operator structure. We formulate the modelling task as a neural ordinary differential equation (ODE) where these learned operators constitute the right-hand side, enabling continuous-in-time predictions through standard ODE solvers and implicitly enforcing PDE constraints. Demonstrated on incompressible and compressible Navier--Stokes equations, our approach achieves better convergence and superior performance when generalising to unseen physics. The method remains parameter-efficient, enabling temporal extrapolation beyond training horizons, and provides interpretable components whose behaviour can be verified against known physics.
title Learning Physical Operators using Neural Operators
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.23113