CALM-PDE: Continuous and Adaptive Convolutions for Latent Space Modeling of Time-dependent PDEs

Jan Hagnberger, Daniel Musekamp, Mathias Niepert

Keywords: Partial Differential Equations, PDEs, Physical Simulations, Convolution, Discretization-Agnostic, Encoder-Decoder, Neural PDE Solvers, Neural Operator, Latent Space

TL;DR: We introduce CALM-PDE, a model based on continuous convolution for discretization-agnostic solving of time-dependent partial differential equations, which achieves strong performance in fluid dynamics simulations.

Abstract: Solving time-dependent Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) using a densely discretized spatial domain is a fundamental problem in various scientific and engineering disciplines, including modeling climate phenomena and fluid dynamics. However, performing these computations directly in the physical space often incurs significant computational costs. To address this issue, several neural surrogate models have been developed that operate in a compressed latent space to solve the PDE. While these approaches reduce computational complexity, they often use Transformer-based attention mechanisms to handle irregularly sampled domains, resulting in increased memory consumption. In contrast, convolutional neural networks allow memory-efficient encoding and decoding but are limited to regular discretizations. Motivated by these considerations, we propose CALM-PDE, a model class that efficiently solves arbitrarily discretized PDEs in a compressed latent space. We introduce a novel continuous convolution-based encoder-decoder architecture that uses an epsilon-neighborhood-constrained kernel and learns to apply the convolution operator to adaptive and optimized query points. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CALM-PDE on a diverse set of PDEs with both regularly and irregularly sampled spatial domains. CALM-PDE is competitive with or outperforms existing baseline methods while offering significant improvements in memory and inference time efficiency compared to Transformer-based methods.

Primary Area: Machine learning for sciences (e.g. climate, health, life sciences, physics, social sciences)

Submission Number: 10738