CINOC: Cardinality-Invariant Neural Operator Policies for Scalable PDE Control

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zanotta, Pietro, Sarkar, Dibakar Roy, Zheng, Honghui, Goswami, Somdatta, Drgoňa, Ján
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Zanotta, Pietro
Sarkar, Dibakar Roy
Zheng, Honghui
Goswami, Somdatta
Drgoňa, Ján
author_facet Zanotta, Pietro
Sarkar, Dibakar Roy
Zheng, Honghui
Goswami, Somdatta
Drgoňa, Ján
contents Controlling partial differential equations (PDEs) with learning-based policies remains fundamentally limited by fixed-dimensional representations: policies trained for a specific sensor, actuator, or agent configuration typically fail when the configuration changes. This limitation is particularly severe in multi-agent PDE control, where policies do not scale across population sizes without retraining. We address this challenge by introducing Cardinality Invariant Neural Operator Control (CINOC), reformulating PDE control as an operator learning problem that maps state fields to continuous control functions and trains them end-to-end through differentiable PDE solvers, yielding policies that naturally adapt to varying sensor and actuator configurations. Remarkably, CINOC policies trained on small swarms exhibit cardinality invariance, allowing for zero-shot transfer to significantly larger populations as well as robustness to partial agent failure. This scalability arises from agents sharing a common policy and coordinating through their physical environment, which produces an emergent self-normalization effect. To explain this phenomenon, we provide a theorem grounded in mean-field theory demonstrating that policy gradients computed from finite-agent systems converge to those of a continuous control limit. Empirically, we validate CINOC on tracking, stabilization, and density transport across linear, nonlinear, chaotic, and turbulent PDEs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_25867
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CINOC: Cardinality-Invariant Neural Operator Policies for Scalable PDE Control
Zanotta, Pietro
Sarkar, Dibakar Roy
Zheng, Honghui
Goswami, Somdatta
Drgoňa, Ján
Systems and Control
Controlling partial differential equations (PDEs) with learning-based policies remains fundamentally limited by fixed-dimensional representations: policies trained for a specific sensor, actuator, or agent configuration typically fail when the configuration changes. This limitation is particularly severe in multi-agent PDE control, where policies do not scale across population sizes without retraining. We address this challenge by introducing Cardinality Invariant Neural Operator Control (CINOC), reformulating PDE control as an operator learning problem that maps state fields to continuous control functions and trains them end-to-end through differentiable PDE solvers, yielding policies that naturally adapt to varying sensor and actuator configurations. Remarkably, CINOC policies trained on small swarms exhibit cardinality invariance, allowing for zero-shot transfer to significantly larger populations as well as robustness to partial agent failure. This scalability arises from agents sharing a common policy and coordinating through their physical environment, which produces an emergent self-normalization effect. To explain this phenomenon, we provide a theorem grounded in mean-field theory demonstrating that policy gradients computed from finite-agent systems converge to those of a continuous control limit. Empirically, we validate CINOC on tracking, stabilization, and density transport across linear, nonlinear, chaotic, and turbulent PDEs.
title CINOC: Cardinality-Invariant Neural Operator Policies for Scalable PDE Control
topic Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25867