Spectral Generator Neural Operator for Stable Long-Horizon PDE Rollouts

Neural operators efficiently simulate dynamical systems by repeatedly predicting the next state. However, small errors at each step can accumulate, causing long- term predictions to drift from the true trajectory. Long-term error reflects both the propagation of earlier prediction errors and new errors introduced at each step. How to reduce these errors is therefore a critical question. We propose the Spectral Generator Neural Operator (SGNO), which combines a linear estimate of the next state with a learned correction. The linear component uses consecutive states in the training data to fit a map from the current state to the next. A neural network corrects this prediction by learning changes that the linear model does not capture, including nonlinear interactions. Both components are trained jointly toward the same next- state target. Experiments across 13 periodic PDE configurations in one to three dimensions show that SGNO accurately learns state evolution on linear tasks and reduces 100-step rollout error by 13-74% over the strongest baseline under the main comparison protocol on each nonlinear task. Longer-horizon extrapolation tests show lower late-window prediction errors on several nonlinear tasks. These results show that combining fitted propagation with learned state-dependent correction can improve long-horizon autoregressive prediction on the evaluated PDE tasks. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SGNO-0D23/.