SIREN Residual Error as a Regularity Diagnostic for Navier-Stokes Equations

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel method using SIREN approximation errors to detect and localize regularity loss and singularities in solutions to the 3D Navier-Stokes equations, validated on vortex and axisymmetric flow simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a regularity diagnostic based on SIREN errors, linking approximation error to solution smoothness and singularity detection in fluid dynamics.

Findings

Error increases at singularities, localizing to stagnation points.

Identifies a critical viscosity for flow regularization transition.

Reproduces blowup signatures consistent with theoretical predictions.

Abstract

We introduce a method for detecting regularity loss in solutions to the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations using the approximation error of Sinusoidal Representation Networks (SIRENs). SIRENs use sin() activations, producing C-infinity outputs that cannot represent non-smooth features. By classical spectral approximation theory, the SIREN error is bounded by O(N^{-s}) where s is the local Sobolev regularity. At a singularity (s to 0), the error is O(1) and localizes via the Gibbs phenomenon. We decompose the velocity field into a cheap analytical baseline (advection-diffusion) and a learned residual (pressure correction), training a compact SIREN (4,867 parameters). We validate on the 3D Taylor-Green vortex, where error concentration increases from 4.9x to 13.6x as viscosity decreases from 0.01 to 0.0001, localizing to the stagnation point -- the geometry matching the singularity proven by Chen and Hou (2025) for 3D Euler. On axisymmetric equations, we reproduce blowup signatures (T* converging across resolutions) and identify a critical viscosity nu_c = 0.00582 for the regularization transition.