# PDEBENCH: An Extensive Benchmark for Scientific Machine Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.07182 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07182/

## Key facts

- Cited by 413 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 97 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Neural Ordinary Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07366/) (2018)
- [Fourier Neural Operator for Parametric Partial Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08895/) (2020)
- [Characterizing possible failure modes in physics-informed neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01050/) (2021)
- [When and why PINNs fail to train: A neural tangent kernel perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14527/) (2020)
- [DeepXDE: A deep learning library for solving differential equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04502/) (2019)
- [Neural Operator: Learning Maps Between Function Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08481/) (2021)
- [Brax -- A Differentiable Physics Engine for Large Scale Rigid Body Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13281/) (2021)
- [Message Passing Neural PDE Solvers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03376/) (2022)
- [Towards Physics-informed Deep Learning for Turbulent Flow Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08655/) (2019)
- [Deep Neural Networks Motivated by Partial Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04272/) (2018)
- [PMLB: A Large Benchmark Suite for Machine Learning Evaluation and Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00512/) (2017)
- [Learned Coarse Models for Efficient Turbulence Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15275/) (2021)
- [Physics-informed neural networks for solving Reynolds-averaged Navierunicodex2013Stokes equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10711/) (2021)
- [Simulation Intelligence: Towards a New Generation of Scientific Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03235/) (2021)
- [NVIDIA SimNet^{TM}: an AI-accelerated multi-physics simulation framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07938/) (2020)
- [HyperPINN: Learning parameterized differential equations with physics-informed hypernetworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01008/) (2021)
- [Physical Design using Differentiable Learned Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00728/) (2022)
- [JAX-FLUIDS: A fully-differentiable high-order computational fluid dynamics solver for compressible two-phase flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13760/) (2022)
- [An Extensible Benchmark Suite for Learning to Simulate Physical Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07799/) (2021)
- [Composing Partial Differential Equations with Physics-Aware Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11798/) (2021)
- [Variational Autoencoding of PDE Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15641/) (2020)
- [A Large-Scale Benchmark for the Incompressible Navier-Stokes Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05309/) (2021)
- [Learning Free-Surface Flow with Physics-Informed Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09705/) (2021)
- [Surrogate-data-enriched Physics-Aware Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05489/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 413)

- [KAN: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19756/) (2024)
- [Neural Operators for Accelerating Scientific Simulations and Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15325/) (2023)
- [PDE-Refiner: Achieving Accurate Long Rollouts with Neural PDE Solvers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05732/) (2023)
- [Poseidon: Efficient Foundation Models for PDEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19101/) (2024)
- [DPOT: Auto-Regressive Denoising Operator Transformer for Large-Scale PDE Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03542/) (2024)
- [The Well: a Large-Scale Collection of Diverse Physics Simulations for Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00568/) (2024)
- [BetterBench: Assessing AI Benchmarks, Uncovering Issues, and Establishing Best Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12990/) (2024)
- [Multiple Physics Pretraining for Physical Surrogate Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02994/) (2023)
- [PINNacle: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Solving PDEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08827/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Autoregressive Conditional Diffusion Models for Turbulent Flow Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01745/) (2023)
- [Neural Operators with Localized Integral and Differential Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16845/) (2024)
- [Pretraining Codomain Attention Neural Operators for Solving Multiphysics PDEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12553/) (2024)
- [CoCoGen: Physically-Consistent and Conditioned Score-based Generative Models for Forward and Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10527/) (2023)
- [CViT: Continuous Vision Transformer for Operator Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13998/) (2024)
- [From Zero to Turbulence: Generative Modeling for 3D Flow Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01776/) (2023)
- [Training neural operators to preserve invariant measures of chaotic attractors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01187/) (2023)
- [CFDBench: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Machine Learning Methods in Fluid Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05963/) (2023)
- [Towards a Foundation Model for Partial Differential Equations: Multi-Operator Learning and Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12355/) (2024)
- [Group Equivariant Fourier Neural Operators for Partial Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05697/) (2023)
- [ChaosBench: A Multi-Channel, Physics-Based Benchmark for Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Climate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00712/) (2024)
- [CodePDE: An Inference Framework for LLM-driven PDE Solver Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08783/) (2025)
- [Learning Neural PDE Solvers with Parameter-Guided Channel Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14118/) (2023)
- [Multilevel Diffusion: Infinite Dimensional Score-Based Diffusion Models for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04772/) (2023)
- [Walrus: A Cross-Domain Foundation Model for Continuum Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15684/) (2025)
- [Unisolver: PDE-Conditional Transformers Towards Universal Neural PDE Solvers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17527/) (2024)
- [Cross-Modal Fine-Tuning: Align then Refine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05738/) (2023)
- [PROSE-FD: A Multimodal PDE Foundation Model for Learning Multiple Operators for Forecasting Fluid Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09811/) (2024)
- [TimeDiT: General-purpose Diffusion Transformers for Time Series Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02322/) (2024)
- [Data-Efficient Operator Learning via Unsupervised Pretraining and In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15734/) (2024)
- [PINNACLE: PINN Adaptive ColLocation and Experimental points selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07662/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Machine learning-based modeling of physical systems has experienced increased interest in recent years. Despite some impressive progress, there is still a lack of benchmarks for Scientific ML that are easy to use but still challenging and representative of a wide range of problems. We introduce PDEBench, a benchmark suite of time-dependent simulation tasks based on Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). PDEBench comprises both code and data to benchmark the performance of novel machine learning models against both classical numerical simulations and machine learning baselines. Our proposed set of benchmark problems contribute the following unique features: (1) A much wider range of PDEs compared to existing benchmarks, ranging from relatively common examples to more realistic and difficult problems; (2) much larger ready-to-use datasets compared to prior work, comprising multiple simulation runs across a larger number of initial and boundary conditions and PDE parameters; (3) more extensible source codes with user-friendly APIs for data generation and baseline results with popular machine learning models (FNO, U-Net, PINN, Gradient-Based Inverse Method). PDEBench allows researchers to extend the benchmark freely for their own purposes using a standardized API and to compare the performance of new models to existing baseline methods. We also propose new evaluation metrics with the aim to provide a more holistic understanding of learning methods in the context of Scientific ML. With those metrics we identify tasks which are challenging for recent ML methods and propose these tasks as future challenges for the community. The code is available at https://github.com/pdebench/PDEBench.