LSR-Net: Learning the Forward Evolution Operator for Nonlinear Fluid Dynamics

Abstract

We introduce the Long-Short-Range Neural Network (LSR-Net), a novel neural operator architecture designed for data-driven forward evolution modeling, and extends it to the prediction of nonlinear fluid dynamics. LSR-Net learns the evolution operator of a dynamical system solely from pairs of initial and future state snapshots, which splits the learnable integral kernel into long-range (LR) and short-range (SR) components within stacked network blocks. While the SR component uses standard convolutions to capture local dynamics, the LR component employs a sum-of-exponentials (SOE) representation. This allows for the efficient computation of global interactions as a trainable Fourier multiplier, reducing computational complexity to $O(n \log n)$ where $n$ is the number of pixels in an input snapshot and requiring only a few parameters per channel. LSR-Net is evaluated on three challenging 2D benchmarks: the coupled Burgers equation, the wave equation with a spatially varying coefficient, and the nonlinear shallow water equation {(SWE)}. Results demonstrate that LSR-Net significantly outperforms the baseline short-range network (SR-Net) as well as FNO and DeepONets in predictive accuracy, achieving substantially lower relative errors by effectively capturing both local fine-scale structures and crucial global pattern interactions.