SINO: Scale-Invariant Neural Operator

Kaichen Ouyang, Chenglei Yu, Chuanrui Wang, Tailin Wu

In scientific machine learning, physical fields governed by partial differential equations exhibit low-rank structure and scale invariance. When solving equations on coarse grids, missing information leads to the closure problem: modeling unresolved physics to recover lost dynamics. Although closure terms depend on grid resolution, they represent scale-invariant physical laws. A model truly learning physics should capture these mechanisms with low-rank parameterization rather than memorizing grid-specific patterns. Inspired by this, we propose the Scale-Invariant Neural Operator (SINO), which learns on normalized physical scales via a dual-branch architecture operating in spectral and spatial domains. SINO uses bottleneck MLPs to generate continuous convolution kernels, embedding an explicit low-rank inductive bias that concentrates more than 95 percent of variance in 2-3 modes, as validated by PCA across benchmarks, while drastically reducing parameters. This principled design yields 38 times steeper scaling law exponents than FNO, demonstrating superior parameter efficiency. We compare SINO with traditional models (U-Net, DeepONet), Transformer models (Transolver, Oformer,…