Neural operator discovery from heterogeneous trajectories (arxiv.org)
arXiv:2607.23337v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Neural operators provide data-driven mappings for modeling dynamical systems. Extending them to families of systems typically requires explicit conditioning variables such as physical parameters, geometries, or boundary conditions. In many real-world settings, these quantities are unobserved. Here, we formulate neural operator discovery (NOD) as the problem of learning both shared solution operators and system-specific variation directly from heterogeneous trajectories without access to labeled governing factors. We introduce a factorized latent-conditioning formulation that jointly learns a neural operator and a low-dimensional latent representation through factorized prediction, trajectory-decoupled sampling, and dimension selection. Across diverse systems, the learned latent representation captures the intrinsic dimensionality of system variation and organizes system instances in a smooth and approximately invertible latent structure aligned with the underlying governing factors. This organization enables generalization to previously unseen system instances, including zero-shot extrapolation across regimes and stable long-horizon prediction. These results establish an interpretable paradigm for operator learning in the absence of explicit factor supervision.
Abstract: Neural operators provide data-driven mappings for modeling dynamical systems. Extending them to families of systems typically requires explicit conditioning variables such as physical parameters, geometries, or boundary conditions. In many real-world settings, these quantities are unobserved. Here, we formulate neural operator discovery (NOD) as the problem of learning both shared solution operators and system-specific variation directly from heterogeneous trajectories without access to labeled governing factors. We introduce a factorized latent-conditioning formulation that jointly learns a neural operator and a low-dimensional latent representation through factorized prediction, trajectory-decoupled sampling, and dimension selection. Across diverse systems, the learned latent representation captures the intrinsic dimensionality of system variation and organizes system instances in a smooth and approximately invertible latent structure aligned with the underlying governing factors. This organization enables generalization to previously unseen system instances, including zero-shot extrapolation across regimes and stable long-horizon prediction. These results establish an interpretable paradigm for operator learning in the absence of explicit factor supervision.
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