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Forcing and Diagnosing Failure Modes of Fourier Neural Operators (arxiv.org)
3 points by TimorousBestie 244 days ago | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: A stress test checks how neural PDE solvers hold up when equations, boundaries, grids, or prediction lengths differ from training, not familiar-case accuracy alone. Across 750 models, the most accurate solvers weren't the most reliable, and weak spots depended on model type and equation.

Abstract · Diagnosing Failure Modes of Neural Operators Across Diverse PDE Families

Neural PDE solvers are increasingly used as learned surrogates for families of partial differential equations, where the key machine learning challenge is not only interpolation on a fixed benchmark distribution but generalization under structured shifts in coefficients, boundary conditions, discretization, and rollout horizon. Yet evaluation is still often dominated by in-distribution test error, making robustness difficult to assess. We introduce a standardized stress-testing framework for neural PDE solvers under deployment-relevant shift. We instantiate it on three representative architectures -- Fourier Neural Operators (FNOs), a DeepONet-style model, and convolutional neural operators (CNOs) -- across five qualitatively different PDE families: dispersive, elliptic, multi-scale fluid, financial, and chaotic systems. Across 750 trained models, we measure robustness using baseline-normalized degradation factors together with spectral and rollout diagnostics. The resulting comparisons reveal that strong in-distribution accuracy does not reliably predict robustness, and that failure patterns depend jointly on architecture and PDE family. Our results provide a clearer basis for evaluating robustness claims in neural PDE solvers and suggest that function-space generalization under structured shift should be treated as a first-class evaluation target.

Lennon Shikhman
arXiv:2601.11428 · cs.LG · submitted Jan 16, 2026 · updated May 22, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Published in Transactions on Machine Learning Research. 17 pages, 7 figures, 1 table

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Full title: Forcing and Diagnosing Failure Modes of Fourier Neural Operators Across Diverse PDE Families