AutoPDE: Reliable Agentic PDE Solving via Explicitly Represented Solver Strategies

2026-06-09

AI Summary

This work addresses a key limitation of conventional LLM-based PDE solvers, which implicitly embed numerical strategies within generated code, making pre-execution validation and post-failure correction challenging. To overcome this, the authors propose AutoPDE, the first framework to explicitly model solution strategies as revisable, decoupled objects separate from implementation code. AutoPDE employs a three-stage pipeline—PDE type identification, numerical method selection, and adaptive parameter tuning—augmented by low-overhead trial solves and a reusable skill library to construct and refine strategies prior to code generation. Evaluated on the PDE Agent Bench, AutoPDE achieves a 54.5% pass rate, outperforming the strongest baseline by 14.2 percentage points, thereby substantially improving both the reliability and interpretability of AI-driven PDE solving.

Abstract

Numerical solvers for partial differential equations (PDEs) are core computational tools in science and engineering. Building reliable PDE solvers requires not only executable code, but a numerical solver strategy, a set of decisions about discretization, stabilization, solver configuration, and resolution control, that matches the PDE structure. Recent LLM-based coding agents have begun to reduce the programming burden by generating and debugging solver implementations. However, they typically move directly from a PDE problem to solver code, leaving the solver strategy implicit in implementation details. Feedback from a failed solve is therefore routed back to code edits rather than to the underlying strategy, so numerical decisions remain hard to check before code is generated and hard to revise using numerical evidence when it fails. To address this limitation, we propose AutoPDE, a code agent that maintains the solver strategy as an explicitly represented object throughout the solving process: an independent, inspectable object that is built before any code is written and can be revised, using numerical evidence, whenever a solve fails. AutoPDE builds and maintains this object in three stages, all drawing from a library of reusable PDE-solving skills: PDE analysis identifies the equation type and algebraic structure; numerical method selection chooses a numerical method that matches the analysis result and commits to a discretization, stabilization, and linear solver accordingly; and adaptive tuning runs low-cost pilot solves to calibrate resolution and tolerances under the prescribed accuracy and runtime budget. We evaluate AutoPDE on the PDE Agent Bench, where experimental results show that AutoPDE achieves a pass rate of $54.5%$, improving over the strongest baseline by $14.2$ percentage points.

Problem

• PDE solving
• solver strategy
• numerical methods
• code generation
• LLM-based agents

Innovation

• explicit solver strategy
• agentic PDE solving
• numerical method selection
• adaptive tuning
• LLM-based code agent