The deep operator networks (DeepONet), a class of neural operators that learn mappings between function spaces, have recently been developed as surrogate models for parametric partial differential equations (PDEs). In this work we propose a derivative-enhanced deep operator network (DE-DeepONet), which leverages derivative information to enhance the solution prediction accuracy and provides a more accurate approximation of solution-to-parameter derivatives, especially when training data are limited. DE-DeepONet explicitly incorporates linear dimension reduction of high dimensional parameter input into DeepONet to reduce training cost and adds derivative loss in the loss function to reduce the number of required parameter-solution pairs. We further demonstrate that the use of derivative loss can be extended to enhance other neural operators, such as the Fourier neural operator (FNO).

Deep Operator Networks (DeepONets) have become a central tool in data-driven operator learning, providing flexible surrogates for nonlinear mappings arising in partial differential equations (PDEs). However, the standard trunk design based on fully connected layers acting on raw spatial or spatiotemporal coordinates struggles to represent sharp gradients, boundary layers, and non-periodic structures commonly found in PDEs posed on bounded domains with Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions. To address these limitations, we introduce the Spectral-Embedded DeepONet (SEDONet), a new DeepONet variant in which the trunk is driven by a fixed Chebyshev spectral dictionary rather than coordinate inputs. This non-periodic spectral embedding provides a principled inductive bias tailored to bounded domains, enabling the learned operator to capture fine-scale non-periodic features that are difficult for Fourier or MLP trunks to represent. SEDONet is evaluated on a suite of PDE benchmarks including 2D Poisson, 1D Burgers, 1D advection-diffusion, Allen-Cahn dynamics, and the Lorenz-96 chaotic system, covering elliptic, parabolic, advective, and multiscale temporal phenomena, all of which can be viewed as canonical problems in computational mechanics. Across all datasets, SEDONet consistently achieves the lowest relative L2 errors among DeepONet, FEDONet, and SEDONet, with average improvements of about 30-40% over the baseline DeepONet and meaningful gains over Fourier-embedded variants on non-periodic geometries. Spectral analyses further show that SEDONet more accurately preserves high-frequency and boundary-localized features, demonstrating the value of Chebyshev embeddings in non-periodic operator learning. The proposed architecture offers a simple, parameter-neutral modification to DeepONets, delivering a robust and efficient spectral framework for surrogate modeling of PDEs on bounded domains.

Fine-grained air pollution forecasting is crucial for urban management and the development of healthy buildings. Deploying portable sensors on mobile platforms such as cars and buses offers a low-cost, easy-to-maintain, and wide-coverage data collection solution. However, due to the random and uncontrollable movement patterns of these non-dedicated mobile platforms, the resulting sensor data are often incomplete and temporally inconsistent. By exploring potential training patterns in the reverse process of diffusion models, we propose Spatio-Temporal Physics-Informed Diffusion Models (STeP-Diff). STeP-Diff leverages DeepONet to model the spatial sequence of measurements along with a PDE-informed diffusion model to forecast the spatio-temporal field from incomplete and time-varying data. Through a PDE-constrained regularization framework, the denoising process asymptotically converges to the convection-diffusion dynamics, ensuring that predictions are both grounded in real-world measurements and aligned with the fundamental physics governing pollution dispersion. To assess the performance of the system, we deployed 59 self-designed portable sensing devices in two cities, operating for 14 days to collect air pollution data. Compared to the second-best performing algorithm, our model achieved improvements of up to 89.12% in MAE, 82.30% in RMSE, and 25.00% in MAPE, with extensive evaluations demonstrating that STeP-Diff effectively captures the spatio-temporal dependencies in air pollution fields.

With the development of digital twins and smart manufacturing systems, there is an urgent need for real-time distortion field prediction to control defects in metal Additive Manufacturing (AM). However, numerical simulation methods suffer from high computational cost, long run-times that prevent real-time use, while conventional Machine learning (ML) models struggle to extract spatiotemporal features for long-horizon prediction and fail to decouple thermo-mechanical fields. This paper proposes a Physics-informed Neural Operator (PINO) to predict z and y-direction distortion for the future 15 s. Our method, Physics-informed Deep Operator Network-Recurrent Neural Network (PIDeepONet-RNN) employs trunk and branch network to process temperature history and encode distortion fields, respectively, enabling decoupling of thermo-mechanical responses. By incorporating the heat conduction equation as a soft constraint, the model ensures physical consistency and suppresses unphysical artifacts, thereby establishing a more physically consistent mapping between the thermal history and distortion. This is important because such a basis function, grounded in physical laws, provides a robust and interpretable foundation for predictions. The proposed models are trained and tested using datasets generated from experimentally validated Finite Element Method (FEM). Evaluation shows that the model achieves high accuracy, low error accumulation, time efficiency. The max absolute errors in the z and y-directions are as low as 0.9733 mm and 0.2049 mm, respectively. The error distribution shows high errors in the molten pool but low gradient norms in the deposited and key areas. The performance of PINO surrogate model highlights its potential for real-time long-horizon physics field prediction in controlling defects.

Deep Operator Networks (DeepONets) have recently emerged as powerful data-driven frameworks for learning nonlinear operators, particularly suited for approximating solutions to partial differential equations. Despite their promising capabilities, the standard implementation of DeepONets, which typically employs fully connected linear layers in the trunk network, can encounter limitations in capturing complex spatial structures inherent to various PDEs. To address this limitation, we introduce Fourier-Embedded trunk networks within the DeepONet architecture, leveraging random fourier feature mappings to enrich spatial representation capabilities. Our proposed Fourier-Embedded DeepONet, FEDONet demonstrates superior performance compared to the traditional DeepONet across a comprehensive suite of PDE-driven datasets, including the two-dimensional Poisson, Burgers', Lorenz-63, Eikonal, Allen-Cahn, and the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation. FEDONet delivers consistently superior reconstruction accuracy across all benchmark PDEs, with particularly large relative $L^2$ error reductions observed in chaotic and stiff systems. This study highlights the effectiveness of Fourier embeddings in enhancing neural operator learning, offering a robust and broadly applicable methodology for PDE surrogate modeling.

Neural operators, particularly the Deep Operator Network (DeepONet), have shown promise in learning mappings between function spaces for solving differential equations. However, standard DeepONet requires input functions to be sampled at fixed locations, limiting its applicability when sensor configurations vary or inputs exist on irregular grids. We introduce the Set Operator Network (SetONet), which modifies DeepONet's branch network to process input functions as unordered sets of location-value pairs. By incorporating Deep Sets principles, SetONet ensures permutation invariance while maintaining the same parameter count as the baseline. On classical operator-learning benchmarks, SetONet achieves parity with DeepONet on fixed layouts while sustaining accuracy under variable sensor configurations or sensor drop-off - conditions for which standard DeepONet is not applicable. More significantly, SetONet natively handles problems where inputs are naturally represented as unstructured point clouds (such as point sources or density samples) rather than values on fixed grids, a capability standard DeepONet lacks. On heat conduction with point sources, advection-diffusion modeling chemical plumes, and optimal transport between density samples, SetONet learns operators end-to-end without rasterization or multi-stage pipelines. These problems feature inputs that are naturally discrete point sets (point sources or density samples) rather than functions on fixed grids. SetONet is a DeepONet-class architecture that addresses such problems with a lightweight design, significantly broadening the applicability of operator learning to problems with variable, incomplete, or unstructured input data.

Time domain simulation, i.e., modeling the system's evolution over time, is a crucial tool for studying and enhancing power system stability and dynamic performance. However, these simulations become computationally intractable for renewable-penetrated grids, due to the small simulation time step required to capture renewable energy resources' ultra-fast dynamic phenomena in the range of 1-50 microseconds. This creates a critical need for solutions that are both fast and scalable, posing a major barrier for the stable integration of renewable energy resources and thus climate change mitigation. This paper explores operator learning, a family of machine learning methods that learn mappings between functions, as a surrogate model for these costly simulations. The paper investigates, for the first time, the fundamental concept of simulation time step-invariance, which enables models trained on coarse time steps to generalize to fine-resolution dynamics. Three operator learning methods are benchmarked on a simple test system that, while not incorporating practical complexities of renewable-penetrated grids, serves as a first proof-of-concept to demonstrate the viability of time step-invariance. Models are evaluated on (i) zero-shot super-resolution, where training is performed on a coarse simulation time step and inference is performed at super-resolution, and (ii) generalization between stable and unstable dynamic regimes. This work addresses a key challenge in the integration of renewable energy for the mitigation of climate change by benchmarking operator learning methods to model physical systems.

A.1 Overview of used notation Table 1: Glossary of used notation. We recall some basic results on the approximation of functions by tanh neural networks in this section. Using the notation of the proof of Theorem 3.5 ( SM B.2), it holds that D Section 3.3 and SM A.2, let ( s, 0) ( s, 0) ( s, 0) ( s, 0) ( s, 0) This is made exact in [15, Section 4]. We now highlight the main steps in the proof. ", (B.18) Putting everything together, we find that if CN This is a consequence of [38, Theorem 36] and Lemma D.1 with " N See SM A.2 for an overview of the notation for finite difference operators.