Stable Fine-Time-Step Long-Horizon Turbulence Prediction with a Multi-Stepsize Mixture-of-Experts Neural Operator

Abstract

Neural operators have been increasingly used as data-driven surrogates for time-marching predictions of turbulent flows. However, long-horizon autoregressive prediction is sensitive to error accumulation and the choice of prediction interval. Excessively small time increments may increase temporal redundancy and lengthen rollouts, which can degrade the stability of neural operators in turbulence forecasting. This work pursues a unified objective: stable long-horizon autoregressive prediction at fine temporal resolution for three-dimensional turbulence. We propose a multi-stepsize mixture-of-experts (Ms-MoE) neural operator built on an implicit factorized Transformer (IFactFormer) backbone. The model conditions on a requested relative stride and uses a time-step router to activate scale-specific routed experts together with a shared expert, yielding a single architecture that represents a family of stride-parameterized time-advancement operators. We evaluate the approach on forced homogeneous isotropic turbulence (HIT) and turbulent channel flow using filtered direct numerical simulation datasets. Relative to sampling intervals used in previous studies, we construct training datasets with up to 20 times finer temporal resolution and report long-horizon autoregressive rollouts using qualitative time-slice comparisons and long-time-averaged statistics. Ms-MoE-IFactFormer yields more stable long-horizon rollouts and improved agreement with long-time-averaged statistics on both HIT and turbulent channel flow, suggesting potential for stable time-marching at fine temporal resolution in more complex turbulent flows.