Neural operators provide fast surrogates for time-dependent PDEs, but autoregressive deployment creates a refinement-allocation problem: prediction errors vary over space and time, while only a finite number of local corrections can be committed along a trajectory.
We formulate this as budgeted adaptive neural-operator solving. A global Fourier neural operator advances the full field, a local operator proposes patch-wise residual corrections, and a set-aware selector chooses where to refine.
A macro policy decides when and how much of the remaining refinement budget to spend.
We introduce rollout-verified policy improvement (RV-PI), which evaluates feasible refinement counts through actual continuation rollouts of the learned PDE solver, converts long-horizon advantages into conservative policy targets, and accepts an update only when held-out trajectory error improves.
Results
On the shallow-water benchmark with a 32-intervention budget, RV-PI achieves a three-seed mean trajectory relative L2 error of 0.6910, improving over immediate-only policy improvement by 5.37% and RandomMacro by 2.41%.
On the forcing-driven Brusselator benchmark with a 76-intervention budget, RV-PI attains 0.09954, improving over immediate-only policy improvement by 2.31% and RandomMacro by 5.32%.
These results show that, under a fixed refinement budget, the value of a local correction depends on its downstream effect on the autoregressive trajectory, not only on its immediate error reduction.