Incorporating NODE with Pre-trained Neural Differential Operator for Learning Dynamics

Learning dynamics governed by differential equations is crucial for predicting and controlling the systems in science and engineering. Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (NODE), a deep learning model integrated with differential equations, learns the dynamics directly from the samples on the trajectory and shows great promise in the scientific field. However, the training of NODE highly depends on the numerical solver, which can amplify numerical noise and be unstable, especially for ill-conditioned dynamical systems. In this paper, to reduce the reliance on the numerical solver, we propose to enhance the supervised signal in learning dynamics. Specifically, beyond learning directly from the trajectory samples, we pre-train a neural differential operator (NDO) to output an estimation of the derivatives to serve as an additional supervised signal. The NDO is pre-trained on a class of symbolic functions, and it learns the mapping between the trajectory samples of these functions to their derivatives. We provide theoretical guarantee on that the output of NDO can well approximate the ground truth derivatives by proper tuning the complexity of the library. To leverage both the trajectory signal and the estimated derivatives from NDO, we propose an algorithm called NDO-NODE, in which the loss function contains two terms: the fitness on the true trajectory samples and the fitness on the estimated derivatives that are output by the pre-trained NDO. Experiments on various of dynamics show that our proposed NDO-NODE can consistently improve the forecasting accuracy.