Transolver-$σ$: Joint Spectral-Physical Subspace Modeling for Neural PDE Solving
Haonan Shangguan, Hang Zhou, Haixu Wu, Yuezhou Ma, Jianmin Wang, Mingsheng Long
Abstract
Neural solvers offer efficient surrogates for numerical simulation of partial differential equations (PDEs). For time-dependent problems, strong one-step accuracy does not necessarily translate into reliable autoregressive rollout. We observe that a solver based only on physical-state modeling can achieve lower one-step error, whereas its spectral-only counterpart can become more accurate at later rollout steps. Motivated by this observation, we present Transolver-$σ$, a neural PDE solver based on joint spectral--physical subspace modeling. Within each block, adaptive physical-state interactions and spectral transformations are modeled in dedicated latent subspaces, whose responses are recomposed to enable information exchange between the two representations. Within the physical subspace, we introduce Slice-Residual Physics-Attention (SRPA), which preserves an explicit slice-space identity path while retaining learnable cross-slice interaction. In parallel, an axis-factorized Fourier operator captures global spectral structure. Across five well-established PDE benchmarks spanning steady-state prediction and time-dependent dynamics, Transolver-$σ$ achieves state-of-the-art with a benchmark-averaged relative error reduction of 33.4% over the strongest baseline for each metric, while consistently improving autoregressive rollout over single-operator counterparts. Transolver-$σ$ further delivers strong gains on coupled multiphysics systems and real-world fluid and combustion measurements from RealPDEBench, demonstrating its effectiveness beyond standard simulation benchmarks.