Structure-Preserving Reduced-Order Modeling via Low-Rank Transport Signatures

Parametrized PDEs with density-valued solutions are often difficult to approximate with classical linear reduced-order models, especially in transport-dominated regimes. We introduce an optimal-transport-based reduced-order modeling that represents each density by the Kantorovich potential transporting a fixed reference density to the target density, and then maps these potentials to transport signatures using a weighted Laplacian associated with the reference measure. This embeds the density-valued solution map in a Hilbert space while preserving control of the induced transport maps and Wasserstein error. We treat the signature map as a continuous matrix indexed by parameters and space, construct a low-rank skeleton decomposition using a maximal-volume criterion, and learn the parameter-to-coefficient map with a neural network for efficient non-intrusive online evaluation. The reconstructed solution is obtained by pushing forward the reference density, so mass preservation is built into the method. We prove a mean-squared Wasserstein error bound separating low-rank approximation, discretization, sampling, and learning errors, and demonstrate the method on a two-dimensional continuity equation, where transport signatures yield substantially lower-rank structure than the original density snapshots.