LGNO: A Local-Global Neural Operator for Hyperbolic Conservation Laws

Mathematics > Numerical Analysis [Submitted on 16 Jun 2026] Title:LGNO: A Local-Global Neural Operator for Hyperbolic Conservation Laws View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:Solutions of hyperbolic conservation laws exhibit both smooth structures across large scales and sharp localized features such as shocks and contact discontinuities, making them difficult to approximate accurately with existing neural operators. The Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) captures long-range interactions well but tends to smear localized structures through excessive numerical dissipation. To address this, we propose a Local-Global Neural Operator (LGNO) that learns a one-step discrete flow map by combining a global FNO branch for representing smooth dynamics at large scales with a local multiresolution branch for enhancing localized discontinuities and nonsmooth features. The model is trained with a one-step loss that combines a physical space prediction term and a spectral penalty on high frequencies to suppress spurious oscillations near steep fronts. On a large collection of benchmarks in one and two dimensions, LGNO consistently outperforms FNO baselines with matched parameter counts, reducing one-step errors by factors of 2-5 and remaining significantly more accurate over long autoregressive rollouts. Most strikingly, although it is trained only on short-time data from a high-order WENO-Z scheme, the long-time rollout of LGNO on a coarse $256^2$ grid exhibits lower numerical dissipation than the same WENO-Z scheme run on a finer $512^2$ grid, while being orders of magnitude cheaper to evaluate. These results suggest that, with an appropriate architecture and training objective, learned operators can effectively learn discrete flow maps. They further suggest that such learned operators have the potential to control long-time numerical dissipation better than the conventional shock-capturing schemes that generate the training data. Current browse context: math.NA References & Citations Loading... Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Recommenders and Search Tools Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.