A Theoretical Framework for Cosmological Field Evolution with Physics-Informed Neural Operators and Geometric Deep Learning

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.65093/aci.v16.n4.2025.44

Keywords:

cosmology, neural operators, graph neural networks, dark matter

Abstract

The large-scale structure (LSS) of the universe poses formidable computational and theoretical challenges for standard cosmological models. We propose a unified theoretical framework that synthesizes six advanced machine learning paradigms to model the evolution of dark matter fields and the dynamics of the cosmic web. This frame-work integrates (1) Neural Operators (NOs) to learn PDE solvers in the continuous limit, (2) Normalizing Flows (NFs) for simulation-based Bayesian inference with exact likelihoods, (3) topological and geometric methods to characterize the structure of the cosmic web, (4) effective field theories (EFTs) and coarse-graining to model multiscale matter dynamics, (5) causal inference to disentangle systematic effects from underlying physics, and (6) geometric autoencoders to learn symmetry-preserving latent representations. We argue that the hybridization of these approaches offers a promising path toward building high-fidelity, computationally efficient, and physically consistent cosmological emulators, capable of overcoming the limitations of current methods and exploiting the wealth of data from upcoming large-scale surveys.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Batzner, S., Musaelian, A., Sun, L., Geiger, M., Mailoa, J.P., Kornbluth, M., et al. (2022). E(3)-equivariant graph neural networks for data-efficient and accurate interatomic potentials. Nature Communications, 13, 2453. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-29939-5

Bronstein, M.M., Bruna, J., Cohen, T. & Veličković, P. (2021). Geometric deep learning: Grids, groups, graphs, geodesics, and gauges. arXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2104.13478

Carlsson, G. (2009). Topology and data. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 46 (2), 255–308. https://doi.org/10.1090/S0273-0979-09-01249-X

Carrasco, J.J.M., Hertzberg, M.P. & Senatore, L. (2012). The effective field theory of cosmological large scale structures. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2012, 082. https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP09(2012)082

Chadebec, C. & Allassonnière, S. (2022). A geometric perspective on variational autoencoders. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, volume 35. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2209.07370

Chen, R.T.Q., Rubanova, Y., Bettencourt, J. & Duvenaud, D. (2018). Neural ordinary differential equations. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, volume 31. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1806.07366

Cranmer, K., Brehmer, J. & Louppe, G. (2020). The frontier of simulation-based inference. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117 (48), 30055–30062. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1912789117

Dax, M., Wildberger, J., Buchholz, S., Green, S.R., Macke, J.H. & Schölkopf, B. (2023). Flow matching for scalable simulation-based inference. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, volume 36. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.17161

Edelsbrunner, H. & Harer, J.L. (2010). Computational Topology: An Introduction. American Mathematical Society. ISBN 978-0-8218-4925-5

Gabbard, H., Messenger, C., Heng, I.S., Tonolini, F. & Murray-Smith, R. (2022). Bayesian parameter estimation using conditional variational autoencoders for gravitational-wave astronomy. Nature Physics, 18, 112–117. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-021-01425-7

Garuda, N., Wu, J.F., Nelson, D. & Pillepich, A. (2024). Estimating dark matter halo masses in simulated galaxy clusters with graph neural networks. arXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2411.12629

Gong, Z., Halder, A., Barreira, A., Seitz, S. & Friedrich, O. (2023). Cosmology from the integrated shear 3-point correlation function: simulated likelihood analyses with machine-learning emulators. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2023 (07), 040. https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2023/07/040

He, S., Li, Y., Feng, Y., Ho, S., Ravanbakhsh, S., Chen, W., et al. (2019). Learning to predict the cosmological structure formation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116 (28),13825–13832. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821458116

Ivanov, M.M. (2022). Effective field theory for large scale structure. arXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2212.08488

Jamieson, D., Li, Y., Alves de Oliveira, R., Villaescusa-Navarro, F., Ho, S. & Spergel, D.N. (2023). Field-level neural network emulator for cosmological N-body simulations. The Astrophysical Journal, 952 (2), 145. http://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/acdb6c

Jeffrey, N., Lanusse, F., Lahav, O. & Starck, J-L. (2020). Deep learning dark matter map reconstructions from DES SV weak lensing data. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 492 (4), 5023–5029. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staa127

Kneer, S., Sayadi, T., Sipp, D., Schmid, P. & Rigas, G. (2021). Symmetry-aware autoencoders: s-PCA and s-nlPCA. arXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2111.02893

Kovachki, N., Li, Z., Liu, B., Azizzadenesheli, K., Bhattacharya, K., Stuart, A., et al. (2023). Neural operator: Learning maps between function spaces with applications to PDEs. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 24 (89), 1–97. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3648699.3648788

Lee, J.Y. & Villaescusa-Navarro, F. (2025). Cosmology with topological deep learning. The Astrophysical Journal, 989, 47. http://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ade806

León, F., Rojas, L., Bazán, V., Martínez, Y., Peña, A. & Garcia, J. (2025). A systematic review of copper heap leaching: Key operational variables, green reagents, and sustainable engineering strategies. Processes, 13 (5), 1513. https://doi.org/10.3390/pr13051513

Li, Z., Zheng, H., Kovachki, N., Jin, D., Chen, H., Liu, B., et al. (2024). Physics-informed neural operator for learning partial differential equations. ACM/IMS Journal of Data Science, 1(3), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1145/3648506

Lipman, Y., Chen, R.T.Q., Ben-Hamu, H., Nickel, M. & Le, M. (2023). Flow matching for generative modeling. In International Conference on Learning Representations. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2210.02747

Martínez, Y., Rojas, L., Peña, A., Valenzuela, M., Hernández, B. & García, J. (2024). Pinns fraccionarias: nuevos horizontes para la memoria prolongada en modelos continuos. Avances en Ciencias e Ingeniería, 15 (3), 93–110. https://doi.org/10.65093/aci.v15.n3.2024.10

Mishra, A.K. and Tolley, E. (2025). SPINN: Advancing cosmological simulations of fuzzy dark matter with physics informed neural networks. The Astrophysical Journal, 988, 114. http://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ade43e

Mootoovaloo, A., García-García, C., Alonso, D. & Ruiz-Zapatero, J.(2025). EMUFLOW: normalizing flows for joint cosmological analysis. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 536 (1), 190–208. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stae2604

Nasiri, A. & Bepler, T. (2022). Unsupervised object representation learning using translation and rotation group equivariant VAE. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, volume 35. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2210.12918

Papamakarios, G., Nalisnick, E., Rezende, D.J., Mohamed, S. & Lakshminarayanan, (2021). Normalizing flows for probabilistic modeling and inference. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 22 (57), 1–64. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.5555/3546258.3546315

Park, S.-H., Ha, S. & Kim, J-K. (2023). A general model-based causal inference method overcomes the curse of synchrony and indirect effect. Nature Communications, 14, 4287. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-39983-4

Pietroni, M. (2012). Coarse-grained cosmological perturbation theory. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2012 (01), 019. https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2012/01/019

Pranav, P., Edelsbrunner, H., van de Weygaert, R., Vegter, G., Kerber, M., Jones, B.J.T. et al. (2017). The topology of the cosmic web in terms of persistent Betti numbers. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 465 (4), 4281–4310. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw2862

Pranav, P., van de Weygaert, R., Vegter, G., Jones, B.J.T., Adler, R.J., Feldbrugge, J., et al. (2019). Topology and geometry of Gaussian random fields I: On Betti numbers, Euler characteristic, and Minkowski functionals. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 485 (3), 4167–4208. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stz541

Ravanbakhsh, S., Oliva, J., Frber, S., Liu, B., Schneider, J. & Poczos, B. (2017). Estimating cosmological parameters from the dark matter distribution. In International Conference on Machine Learning, pages 2407–2416. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3045390.3045644

Rojas, L., León, F., Bazan, V. & Hernández, B. (2024). Aproximaciones basadas en distancias ergódicas y mezclado caótico en pilas de lixiviación. Avances en Ciencias e Ingeniería, 15 (2), 37–50. https://doi.org/10.65093/aci.v15.n2.2024.12

Rojas-Valdivia, L. (2025). Geometría de Kerr y ley del área de Hawking: espectroscopía de anillo y ciencia de datos reproducible en agujeros negros rotatorios. Avances en Ciencias e Ingeniería, 16 (1), 47–58. https://doi.org/10.65093/aci.v16.n1.2025.22

Satorras, V.G., Hoogeboom, E. & Welling, M. (2021). E(n) equivariant graph neural networks. In International Conference on Machine Learning, pages 9323–9332. https://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/satorras21a.html

Schölkopf, B., Locatello, F., Bauer, S., Ke, N.R., Kalchbrenner, N., Goyal, A., et al. (2021). Toward causal representation learning. Proceedings of the IEEE, 109 (5), 612–634. http://doi.org/10.1109/JPROC.2021.3058954

Shirasaki, M., Yoshida, N. & Ikeda, S. (2019). Denoising weak lensing mass maps with deep learning. Physical Review D, 100, 043527. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.100.043527

Sousbie, T. (2011). The persistent cosmic web and its filamentary structure—I. Theory and implementation. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 414 (1), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2011.18394.x

Sousbie, T., Pichon, C. & Kawahara, H. (2011). The persistent cosmic web and its fila-mentary structure—II. Illustrations. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 414 (1), 384–403. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2011.18395.x

Stachurski, F., Messenger, C. & Hendry, M. (2024). Cosmological inference using gravitational waves and normalizing flows. Physical Review D, 109, 123547. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.109.123547

Uhlemann, C., Kopp, M. & Haugg, T. (2015). Coarse-grained cosmological perturbation theory: Stirring up the dust model. Physical Review D, 91, 084010. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.91.084010

Villaescusa-Navarro, F., Anglés-Alcázar, D., Genel, S., Spergel, D.N., Somerville, R.S., Dave, R., et al. (2021). The CAMELS project: Cosmology and astrophysics with machine-learning simulations. The Astrophysical Journal, 915 (1), 71. http://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/abf7ba

Villanueva-Domingo, P. & Villaescusa-Navarro, F. (2022). Inferring halo masses with graph neural networks. The Astrophysical Journal, 935 (1), 30. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ac7aa3

von Kügelgen, (2024). Identifiable causal representation learning: Unsupervised, multi-view, and multi-environment. arXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2406.13371

Wilding, G., Nevenzeel, K., van de Weygaert, R., Vegter, G., Pranav, P., Jones, B.J.T., et al. (2021). Persistent homology of the cosmic web—I. Hierarchical topology in ΛCDM cosmologies. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 507 (2), 2968–2990. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stab2326

Winter, R., Bertolini, M., Le, T., Noé, F. & Clevert, D.-A. (2022). Unsupervised learning of group invariant and equivariant representations. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, volume 35. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2202.07559

Downloads

Published

2025-12-31

How to Cite

Rojas, L. (2025). A Theoretical Framework for Cosmological Field Evolution with Physics-Informed Neural Operators and Geometric Deep Learning . Avances En Ciencia E Ingeniería, 16(4), 45–56. https://doi.org/10.65093/aci.v16.n4.2025.44