Complex systems often show macroscopic coherent behavior due to the interactions of microscopic agents like molecules, cells, or individuals in a population with their environment. However, simulating such systems poses several computational challenges during simulation as the underlying dynamics vary and span wide spatiotemporal scales of interest. To capture the fast-evolving features, finer time steps are required while ensuring that the simulation time is long enough to capture the slow-scale behavior, making the analyses computationally unmanageable. This paper showcases how deep learning techniques can be used to develop a precise time-stepping approach for multiscale systems using the joint discovery of coordinates and flow maps. While the former allows us to represent the multiscale dynamics on a representative basis, the latter enables the iterative time-stepping estimation of the reduced variables. The resulting framework achieves state-of-the-art predictive accuracy while incurring lesser computational costs. We demonstrate this ability of the proposed scheme on the large-scale Fitzhugh Nagumo neuron model and the 1D Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation in the chaotic regime.

Forecasting complex system dynamics, particularly for long-term predictions, is persistently hindered by error accumulation and computational burdens. This study presents RefreshNet, a multiscale framework developed to overcome these challenges, delivering an unprecedented balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy. RefreshNet incorporates convolutional autoencoders to identify a reduced order latent space capturing essential features of the dynamics and strategically employs multiple recurrent neural networks (RNN) blocks operating at varying temporal resolutions within the latent space, thus allowing the capture of latent dynamics at multiple temporal scales. The unique "refreshing" mechanism in RefreshNet allows coarser blocks to reset inputs of finer blocks, effectively controlling and alleviating error accumulation. This design demonstrates superiority over existing techniques regarding computational efficiency and predictive accuracy, especially in long-term forecasting. The framework is validated using three benchmark applications: the FitzHugh-Nagumo system, the Reaction-Diffusion equation, and Kuramoto-Sivashinsky dynamics. RefreshNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in long-term forecasting accuracy and speed, marking a significant advancement in modeling complex systems and opening new avenues in understanding and predicting their behavior.

Multiscale is a hallmark feature of complex nonlinear systems. While the simulation using the classical numerical methods is restricted by the local Taylor series constraints, the multiscale techniques are often limited by finding heuristic closures. This study proposes a new method for simulating multiscale problems using deep neural networks. By leveraging the hierarchical learning of neural network time steppers, the method adapts time steps to approximate dynamical system flow maps across timescales. This approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in less computational time compared to fixed-step neural network solvers. The proposed method is demonstrated on several nonlinear dynamical systems, and source codes are provided for implementation. This method has the potential to benefit multiscale analysis of complex systems and encourage further investigation in this area.

A persistent feature of complex systems is the emergence of macroscopic coherent behavior from the interactions of microscopic agents, e.g., molecules, cells and individuals in a population, between themselves and their environment resulting in the multiscale behavior of such systems. Multiscale systems are computationally expensive to simulate as they exhibit behavior at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Capturing the fastest time scale requires taking extremely small steps in numerical time stepping algorithms while capturing the slow scale behavior necessitates long term solution, thus rendering the task computationally prohibitive. In this paper, we demonstrate how techniques from deep learning can be used to derive an accurate time stepping scheme for multiscale systems. The proposed technique can capture the multiscale PDE behavior with high accuracy while being computationally tractable. We demonstrate the scheme on two benchmark nonlinear PDEs that exhibit multiscale behavior.