Learning the Willmore flow with a lightweight neural operator

Abstract

We extend to the Willmore flow the phase-field neural operator approach proposed by Bretin, Denis, Masnou, and Terii (2022) for mean curvature motion in two and three dimensions. The resulting lightweight, single-time-step architecture is motivated by a Bence-Merriman-Osher-type expansion of the Allen-Cahn semigroup, and is trained using trajectories generated by a hybrid minimizing movement scheme. In our experiments with non-oriented interfaces, unconstrained convolution kernels produce anisotropic dynamics, whereas radial kernels enhance the evolution process. We also construct three-dimensional kernels from trained two-dimensional kernels via their radial Fourier profiles, which provides an effective initialization for the non-oriented 3D model. Finally, we show applications to curve and surface reconstruction from unoriented point clouds, including reconstruction using the transferred model without the need for additional 3D training.