SGNO: Spectral Generator Neural Operators for Stable Long Horizon PDE Rollouts

Abstract

Autoregressive neural PDE surrogates predict future states by repeatedly applying a learned one-step operator. This is a simple and widely used method, but small one-step errors can accumulate during long rollouts. The resulting drift often appears as spectral amplitude distortion, phase misalignment, and nonlinear mode-interaction error. These effects are especially important for time-dependent PDEs with clear Fourier structure. We introduce the Spectral Generator Neural Operator (SGNO), a structured autoregressive neural operator for long-horizon PDE forecasting. SGNO organizes each learned one-step map as a structured spectral evolution update. A real-valued nonpositive diagonal generator provides a gain-controlled spectral backbone, while a learned correction pathway with complex-valued spectral mixing completes the residual evolution. This design gives the autoregressive step an evolution-like structure while retaining the flexibility needed for dissipative, dispersive, transport-dominated, and nonlinear PDEs. SGNO is designed for periodic linear and semilinear evolution PDEs with Fourier multiplier linear dynamics. Across ten mechanism-matched APEBench tasks spanning this regime, SGNO consistently outperforms strong single-step autoregressive baselines in long-horizon rollout accuracy, reducing GMean100 by a median of 74.8% relative to the strongest available non-SGNO baseline, with per-task reductions ranging from 13.6% to 92.9%. The gains are strongest on dispersive and transport-dominated tasks, as well as tasks involving nonlinear closure and mode coupling. Spectral diagnostics show lower spectral energy error and improved rollout-level phase fidelity. Ablations show that the constrained generator, the structured update, and the learned correction pathway each contribute to performance. The code is available at https://github.com/cruiseresearchgroup/SGNO.