DU-NO: A Parameter-Efficient Double U-Shaped Neural Operator for Phase-Resolving Wave Modeling
Abstract: Phase-resolving wave models such as FUNWAVE-TVD are the accuracy standard for nearshore dynamics, resolving the shoaling, refraction, and breaking of individual waves, but their cost rules them out for the ensembles, uncertainty quantification, and real-time warning that operational forecasting demands. Neural operators promise solver-level accuracy at a fraction of that cost, yet on wave-dominated fields the accurate ones are large: hybrid spectral-convolutional operators such as U-FNO (the strongest baseline in our study after DU-NO) buy their fidelity with tens of millions of parameters. We introduce DU-NO (Double U-shaped Neural Operator), a multiscale U-shaped spectral operator that attaches lightweight convolutional U-Net branches only at its two shallowest encoder and decoder levels. The placement follows a sampling argument: high-wavenumber content exists only on fine grids, so the local, full-band pathways go where that content lives, while the coarse, band-limited levels stay purely spectral. A depth-decaying mode schedule holds the model to 3.64M parameters, an order of magnitude below U-FNO. On our publicly released FUNWAVE-TVD benchmark, DU-NO attains the best autoregressive rollout error of six identically trained architectures, improving on U-FNO by 14.9% with 10.8x fewer parameters, and a frequency-band analysis shows the gain holds across all bands, including the high-wavenumber band where truncated-spectral operators collapse. Parameter-matched controls confirm the gain is architectural: rescaled to the same 3.6M budget, the best baseline still trails DU-NO by 28.6%. The advantage carries beyond nearshore waves: DU-NO matches the strongest baselines on 2D Navier-Stokes and wins clearly on PDEBench shallow-water rollouts. Code, trained models, and evaluation artifacts are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/duno-code-5A7B/.