Does Text Steer Neural PDE Surrogates? A Controlled Diagnostic with OperatorCLIP
Lower error from a text-conditioned neural surrogate does not, by itself, show that the model uses the meaning of the text. We examine this attribution problem with OperatorCLIP, comparing an unconditioned FNO, a constant-sentence FiLM control, and a fixed task description trained with contrastive alignment. Three-seed experiments cover Darcy2D, ShallowWater2D, and three-dimensional compressible Navier-Stokes (CNS3D). Constant conditioning has lower mean test error on both 2D tasks. Relative to this control, task text plus alignment has a similar mean on ShallowWater2D and CNS3D and a higher mean on Darcy2D; these descriptive comparisons have substantial seed uncertainty. The latter compa...
| Authors | Aadi Dash, Lennon J. Shikhman, Michael Galarnyk |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 29 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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