MNO: Multiscale Neural Operator for Computational Fluid Dynamics with 3D Point Cloud Data

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission17525 Authors

Keywords: Physics-informed nerual networks, nerual operator, PDE, CFD

Abstract: Neural operators have emerged as a powerful data-driven paradigm for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs), offering orders-of-magnitude acceleration over traditional solvers. However, existing approaches still suffer from limited accuracy and scalability, particularly on irregular domains where fluid flows exhibit rich multiscale structures. In this work, we introduce the Multiscale Neural Operator (MNO), a new architecture for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) on three-dimensional (3D) unstructured point clouds. MNO explicitly decomposes information across three scales: a global dimension-shrinkage attention module for long-range dependencies, a local graph attention module for neighborhood-level interactions, and a micro point-wise attention module for fine-grained details. This design preserves multiscale inductive biases while remaining computationally efficient. We evaluate MNO on four diverse benchmarks, covering both steady-state and unsteady flow scenarios with up to 300K points. Across all tasks, MNO consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing prediction errors by 5% to 40% and demonstrating improved robustness in challenging 3D CFD problems. Our results highlight the importance of explicit multiscale design for neural operators and establish MNO as a scalable framework for learning complex fluid dynamics on irregular domains.

Primary Area: applications to physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.)

Submission Number: 17525