CoupledFlow: One-Step Neural Operators for Coupled Multi-Physics PDEs

arXiv:2611.10945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces COUPLED FLOW, a new neural operator learning framework for multi-physics PDE systems that captures the co-evolution of multiple physical processes by modeling their cross-process interactions. Unlike existing neural operator methods that primarily target single-physics settings, COUPLED FLOW employs a novel structure-constrained flow matching algorithm to learn process- specific mean velocity fields conditioned on the full multi-physics state. This enables fast and accurate one-step prediction of coupled PDE systems that would otherwise require expensive numerical simulations. A key challenge in training COUPLED FLOW however lies in sampling structure-constrained conditional flow interpolants that capture cross-process correlations and serve as training examples for flow matching. To address this challenge, we derive a multi-physics mean-flow consistency identity that characterizes cross-process interactions and defines the structure-constrained mean-flow matching loss. To provide informative training samples for flow matching with this loss, we develop a principled method for sampling correlated conditional interpolants based on posterior multi-output Gaus- sian processes, which capture richer cross-process correlations than the commonly used endpoint-conditioned linear interpolants. We also establish a theoretical re- sult showing that the Wasserstein-2 distance between the predicted and oracle PDE solution distributions is upper-bounded in terms of the structure-constrained flow matching loss and the smoothness of the learned flow. Experiments across diverse coupled PDE benchmarks demonstrate that COUPLED FLOW consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art neural operators and generative PDE solvers.