Unsupervised Adaptation of PDE Foundation Models

Abstract

Pretrained partial differential equation (PDE) foundation models can generalize across different equations, but adapting them to unseen PDE systems typically requires dense solution data, which is often expensive or unavailable. To address this limitation, we propose an unsupervised PDE-based finetuning framework that eliminates the need for ground-truth solutions. We first pretrain a neighborhood attention Transformer on diverse time-dependent PDEs spanning varying spatial scales, yielding transferable representations across heterogeneous equations. In the adaptation stage, we construct a physics-based objective using the PDE residual and boundary conditions, and finetune the model on unseen equations via low-rank adaptation (LoRA). To address the uneven learning across physical quantities in standard LoRA, we introduce NSLoRA, a Newton-Schulz orthogonalized variant that rebalances adaptation. Our method achieves performance comparable to supervised LoRA finetuning without requiring any ground-truth solutions, while consistently outperforming competitive neural operator baselines and recent PDE foundation models across heterogeneous PDE benchmarks spanning multiple spatial dimensions.

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BibTeX

@article{song2026unsupervised,
  title = {Unsupervised Adaptation of PDE Foundation Models},
  author = {Ziye Song and Zhao Wei and Xin Yu and Ivor Tsang and Yueming Lyu},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Pretrained partial differential equation (PDE) foundation models can generalize across different equations, but adapting them to unseen PDE systems typically requires dense solution data, which is often expensive or unavailable. To address this limitation, we propose an unsupervised PDE-based finetuning framework that eliminates the need for ground-truth solutions. We first pretrain a neighborhood attention Transformer on diverse time-dependent PDEs spanning varying spatial scales, yielding tran},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07053},
  keywords = {cs.AI},
  eprint = {2608.07053},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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