Title: From Uniform to Adaptive: General Skip-Block Mechanisms for Efficient PDE Neural Operators
Primary area: applications to physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.)
Keywords: Neural Operators, AI4PDE, AI4Science

Abstract: In recent years, Neural Operators(NO) have gradually emerged as a popular approach for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). However, their application to large-scale engineering tasks suffers from significant computational overhead. And the fact that current models impose a uniform computational cost while physical fields exhibit vastly different complexities constitutes a fundamental mismatch, which is the root of this inefficiency. For instance, in turbulence flows, intricate vortex regions require deeper network processing compared to stable flows. To address this, we introduce a framework: Skip-Block Routing (SBR), a general framework designed for Transformer-based neural operators, capable of being integrated into their multi-layer architectures. First, SBR uses a routing mechanism to learn the complexity and ranking of tokens, which is then applied during inference. Then, in later layers, it decides how many tokens are passed forward based on this ranking. This way, the model focuses more processing capacity on the tokens that are more complex. Experiments demonstrate that SBR is a general framework that seamlessly integrates into various neural operators. Our method reduces computational cost by approximately 50\% in terms of Floating Point Operations (FLOPs), while still delivering up to $2\times$ faster inference without sacrificing accuracy.