Learning PDE Dynamics between Submanifolds Using Green's Observation Operators

Abstract

Many physical systems are driven and observed only on lower-dimensional submanifolds of a larger spatial domain, while their dynamics are governed by the ambient medium occupying that domain. Examples include laser-heated parts imaged by an infrared camera, and ground-level emissions measured on a sensor plane. Full-domain solvers, however, compute the entire volume for every new source although only the observation submanifold is needed, and black-box surrogates do not exploit that the ambient medium remains fixed. We introduce the \emph{Green's Observation Operator (GObO)}, which maps the ambient medium once to the Green's kernel of a linear PDE restricted to the source and observation submanifolds. New sources then cost one lower-dimensional integral and no network evaluation. Exponential rates in the kernel yield an exact finite streaming state with horizon-independent memory; we prove its stability and an approximation rate for the restricted heat kernel. On three-dimensional heat conduction and advection--diffusion with collocated and distinct source and observation geometries, GObO trained on static sources predicts responses to moving sources zero-shot with 4--8$\times$ lower error than black-box surrogates, at 1.4\,ms per query after a single conditioning pass. The same kernel transfers across resolutions and admits corrections for mild nonlinearities, including radiative losses and temperature-dependent conductivity, without retraining, at the cost of lower in-distribution accuracy.