ICML 2026poster0 citations

Origo: Physically Interpretable Multi-Physics PDE Pre-training through Neural Operator Splitting

Li Sun, Hongbo Lv, Zhikai Jiang, Zhongtian Sun, Lanxu Yang, Philip Yu

Abstract

Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) play a fundamental role in scientific computing, and recent efforts have sought to extend the success of foundation models to PDE solving. However, multi-physics PDE pre-training faces the unique challenge of disentangling dynamic heterogeneity to learn universal, elementary patterns that generalize to new PDEs. Additionally, cross-physics transfer lacks a theoretical framework for interpretability—specifically, understanding which pre-trained operator knowledge is effectively transferred to target PDEs. To bridge these gaps, we introduce the theory of neural operator splitting, which decomposes PDE evolution into a modulated global spectral operator and sparse local constitutive mechanisms. A key innovation is Origo, which provides a neural operator bank that enables the identification of operator-level generalization patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong zero-shot generalization and mechanism-level interpretability on unseen PDEs.

Theory
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
sun2026origo,
title={Origo: Interpretable Multi-physics {PDE} Foundation Model through Neural Operator Splitting},
author={Li Sun and Hongbo Lv and Zhikai Jiang and Zhongtian Sun and Lanxu Yang and Philip S. Yu},
booktitle={Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=nBDuY2PjTY}
}