Evaluating the Adversarial Robustness for Fourier Neural Operators
This provides a sensitivity analysis tool for assessing adversarial robustness in ML-based scientific models, addressing a critical trustworthiness issue for researchers in computational science, though it is incremental as it applies existing adversarial methods to a new model type.
The study tackled the adversarial robustness of Fourier Neural Operators (FNOs) in scientific discovery by generating adversarial examples with norm-bounded perturbations, finding that robustness degrades rapidly with increasing perturbation levels, especially in complex cases like 2D Darcy and Navier scenarios.
In recent years, Machine-Learning (ML)-driven approaches have been widely used in scientific discovery domains. Among them, the Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) was the first to simulate turbulent flow with zero-shot super-resolution and superior accuracy, which significantly improves the speed when compared to traditional partial differential equation (PDE) solvers. To inspect the trustworthiness, we provide the first study on the adversarial robustness of scientific discovery models by generating adversarial examples for FNO, based on norm-bounded data input perturbations. Evaluated on the mean squared error between the FNO model's output and the PDE solver's output, our results show that the model's robustness degrades rapidly with increasing perturbation levels, particularly in non-simplistic cases like the 2D Darcy and the Navier cases. Our research provides a sensitivity analysis tool and evaluation principles for assessing the adversarial robustness of ML-based scientific discovery models.