HAMNO: A Hierarchical Adaptive Multi-scale Neural Operator with Physics-Informed Learning for Dynamical Systems
About
Neural operators provide a powerful framework for learning solution mappings of partial differential equations directly in function space. However, many existing architectures still struggle to represent nonlinear time-dependent systems that involve multi-scale structures, long-range interactions, and stable long-time evolution. In this work, we introduce the Hierarchical Adaptive Multi-scale Neural Operator (HAMNO), a neural-operator architecture that combines local convolutional representations, global spectral operators, and hierarchical encoder-decoder processing. The central component of HAMNO is a data-dependent gating mechanism that adaptively balances local and global information at each spatial location, allowing the model to resolve fine-scale features while preserving long-range dependencies. We further develop a physics-informed extension, PI-HAMNO, based on a multi-objective loss strategy that combines data fitting with strong- and weak-form physics constraints. The strong-form term penalizes the domain-integrated squared PDE residual in physical coordinates, while the weak-form term is constructed by multiplying the governing residual by finite-element test functions and evaluating the resulting element integrals using centroid-based tetrahedral quadrature. The framework is evaluated on non-periodic Allen-Cahn (AC), Cahn-Hilliard (CH), and Swift-Hohenberg (SH) equations defined on cubic domains. Across long-horizon rollout, data-limited training, out-of-distribution initial-condition shifts, and random-seed variations, HAMNO improves predictive accuracy over standard neural-operator baselines, while PI-HAMNO further enhances stability, physical consistency, and data efficiency. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/MBamdad/HAMNO .
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PDE Rollout | Allen-Cahn 3D | Relative L2 Error (t=50)4.1246 | 24 | |
| Rollout Prediction | Swift-Hohenberg 3D (test) | Rel. L2 Error @ t=500.0554 | 24 | |
| Rollout Prediction | Cahn-Hilliard 3D | Relative L2 Error @ t=500.0388 | 24 | |
| PDE solving | 3D CH (Cahn-Hilliard) alpha=20, tau=70 unseen initial-condition (OOD) | Relative L2 Error at t=501.0045 | 8 | |
| PDE solving | 3D CH (Cahn-Hilliard) (alpha in [15, 35], tau in [60, 90]) unseen initial-condition (OOD) | Relative L2 Error at t=501.1922 | 8 | |
| Operator learning for 3D Allen-Cahn equation | 3D Allen-Cahn alpha=60, tau=260 (OOD) | Relative L2 Error at t=503.3856 | 8 | |
| Operator learning for 3D Allen-Cahn equation | 3D Allen-Cahn alpha in [20, 90], tau in [160, 260] (OOD) | Relative L2 Error (t=50)3.2292 | 8 |