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SubscribeDrivAerML: High-Fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics Dataset for Road-Car External Aerodynamics
Machine Learning (ML) has the potential to revolutionise the field of automotive aerodynamics, enabling split-second flow predictions early in the design process. However, the lack of open-source training data for realistic road cars, using high-fidelity CFD methods, represents a barrier to their development. To address this, a high-fidelity open-source (CC-BY-SA) public dataset for automotive aerodynamics has been generated, based on 500 parametrically morphed variants of the widely-used DrivAer notchback generic vehicle. Mesh generation and scale-resolving CFD was executed using consistent and validated automatic workflows representative of the industrial state-of-the-art. Geometries and rich aerodynamic data are published in open-source formats. To our knowledge, this is the first large, public-domain dataset for complex automotive configurations generated using high-fidelity CFD.
AhmedML: High-Fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics Dataset for Incompressible, Low-Speed Bluff Body Aerodynamics
The development of Machine Learning (ML) methods for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is currently limited by the lack of openly available training data. This paper presents a new open-source dataset comprising of high fidelity, scale-resolving CFD simulations of 500 geometric variations of the Ahmed Car Body - a simplified car-like shape that exhibits many of the flow topologies that are present on bluff bodies such as road vehicles. The dataset contains simulation results that exhibit a broad set of fundamental flow physics such as geometry and pressure-induced flow separation as well as 3D vortical structures. Each variation of the Ahmed car body were run using a high-fidelity, time-accurate, hybrid Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) - Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) turbulence modelling approach using the open-source CFD code OpenFOAM. The dataset contains boundary, volume, geometry, and time-averaged forces/moments in widely used open-source formats. In addition, the OpenFOAM case setup is provided so that others can reproduce or extend the dataset. This represents to the authors knowledge, the first open-source large-scale dataset using high-fidelity CFD methods for the widely used Ahmed car body that is available to freely download with a permissive license (CC-BY-SA).
DrivAerNet++: A Large-Scale Multimodal Car Dataset with Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulations and Deep Learning Benchmarks
We present DrivAerNet++, the largest and most comprehensive multimodal dataset for aerodynamic car design. DrivAerNet++ comprises 8,000 diverse car designs modeled with high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The dataset includes diverse car configurations such as fastback, notchback, and estateback, with different underbody and wheel designs to represent both internal combustion engines and electric vehicles. Each entry in the dataset features detailed 3D meshes, parametric models, aerodynamic coefficients, and extensive flow and surface field data, along with segmented parts for car classification and point cloud data. This dataset supports a wide array of machine learning applications including data-driven design optimization, generative modeling, surrogate model training, CFD simulation acceleration, and geometric classification. With more than 39 TB of publicly available engineering data, DrivAerNet++ fills a significant gap in available resources, providing high-quality, diverse data to enhance model training, promote generalization, and accelerate automotive design processes. Along with rigorous dataset validation, we also provide ML benchmarking results on the task of aerodynamic drag prediction, showcasing the breadth of applications supported by our dataset. This dataset is set to significantly impact automotive design and broader engineering disciplines by fostering innovation and improving the fidelity of aerodynamic evaluations.
CFDBench: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Machine Learning Methods in Fluid Dynamics
In recent years, applying deep learning to solve physics problems has attracted much attention. Data-driven deep learning methods produce fast numerical operators that can learn approximate solutions to the whole system of partial differential equations (i.e., surrogate modeling). Although these neural networks may have lower accuracy than traditional numerical methods, they, once trained, are orders of magnitude faster at inference. Hence, one crucial feature is that these operators can generalize to unseen PDE parameters without expensive re-training.In this paper, we construct CFDBench, a benchmark tailored for evaluating the generalization ability of neural operators after training in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) problems. It features four classic CFD problems: lid-driven cavity flow, laminar boundary layer flow in circular tubes, dam flows through the steps, and periodic Karman vortex street. The data contains a total of 302K frames of velocity and pressure fields, involving 739 cases with different operating condition parameters, generated with numerical methods. We evaluate the effectiveness of popular neural operators including feed-forward networks, DeepONet, FNO, U-Net, etc. on CFDBnech by predicting flows with non-periodic boundary conditions, fluid properties, and flow domain shapes that are not seen during training. Appropriate modifications were made to apply popular deep neural networks to CFDBench and enable the accommodation of more changing inputs. Empirical results on CFDBench show many baseline models have errors as high as 300% in some problems, and severe error accumulation when performing autoregressive inference. CFDBench facilitates a more comprehensive comparison between different neural operators for CFD compared to existing benchmarks.
DeepCFD: Efficient Steady-State Laminar Flow Approximation with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation by the numerical solution of the Navier-Stokes equations is an essential tool in a wide range of applications from engineering design to climate modeling. However, the computational cost and memory demand required by CFD codes may become very high for flows of practical interest, such as in aerodynamic shape optimization. This expense is associated with the complexity of the fluid flow governing equations, which include non-linear partial derivative terms that are of difficult solution, leading to long computational times and limiting the number of hypotheses that can be tested during the process of iterative design. Therefore, we propose DeepCFD: a convolutional neural network (CNN) based model that efficiently approximates solutions for the problem of non-uniform steady laminar flows. The proposed model is able to learn complete solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations, for both velocity and pressure fields, directly from ground-truth data generated using a state-of-the-art CFD code. Using DeepCFD, we found a speedup of up to 3 orders of magnitude compared to the standard CFD approach at a cost of low error rates.
Physics-based parameterized neural ordinary differential equations: prediction of laser ignition in a rocket combustor
In this work, we present a novel physics-based data-driven framework for reduced-order modeling of laser ignition in a model rocket combustor based on parameterized neural ordinary differential equations (PNODE). Deep neural networks are embedded as functions of high-dimensional parameters of laser ignition to predict various terms in a 0D flow model including the heat source function, pre-exponential factors, and activation energy. Using the governing equations of a 0D flow model, our PNODE needs only a limited number of training samples and predicts trajectories of various quantities such as temperature, pressure, and mass fractions of species while satisfying physical constraints. We validate our physics-based PNODE on solution snapshots of high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations of laser-induced ignition in a prototype rocket combustor. We compare the performance of our physics-based PNODE with that of kernel ridge regression and fully connected neural networks. Our results show that our physics-based PNODE provides solutions with lower mean absolute errors of average temperature over time, thus improving the prediction of successful laser ignition with high-dimensional parameters.
Evaluation of Surrogate Models for Multi-fin Flapping Propulsion Systems
The aim of this study is to develop surrogate models for quick, accurate prediction of thrust forces generated through flapping fin propulsion for given operating conditions and fin geometries. Different network architectures and configurations are explored to model the training data separately for the lead fin and rear fin of a tandem fin setup. We progressively improve the data representation of the input parameter space for model predictions. The models are tested on three unseen fin geometries and the predictions validated with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) data. Finally, the orders of magnitude gains in computational performance of these surrogate models, compared to experimental and CFD runs, vs their tradeoff with accuracy is discussed within the context of this tandem fin configuration.
From Zero to Turbulence: Generative Modeling for 3D Flow Simulation
Simulations of turbulent flows in 3D are one of the most expensive simulations in computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Many works have been written on surrogate models to replace numerical solvers for fluid flows with faster, learned, autoregressive models. However, the intricacies of turbulence in three dimensions necessitate training these models with very small time steps, while generating realistic flow states requires either long roll-outs with many steps and significant error accumulation or starting from a known, realistic flow state - something we aimed to avoid in the first place. Instead, we propose to approach turbulent flow simulation as a generative task directly learning the manifold of all possible turbulent flow states without relying on any initial flow state. For our experiments, we introduce a challenging 3D turbulence dataset of high-resolution flows and detailed vortex structures caused by various objects and derive two novel sample evaluation metrics for turbulent flows. On this dataset, we show that our generative model captures the distribution of turbulent flows caused by unseen objects and generates high-quality, realistic samples amenable for downstream applications without access to any initial state.
A Deep Conjugate Direction Method for Iteratively Solving Linear Systems
We present a novel deep learning approach to approximate the solution of large, sparse, symmetric, positive-definite linear systems of equations. These systems arise from many problems in applied science, e.g., in numerical methods for partial differential equations. Algorithms for approximating the solution to these systems are often the bottleneck in problems that require their solution, particularly for modern applications that require many millions of unknowns. Indeed, numerical linear algebra techniques have been investigated for many decades to alleviate this computational burden. Recently, data-driven techniques have also shown promise for these problems. Motivated by the conjugate gradients algorithm that iteratively selects search directions for minimizing the matrix norm of the approximation error, we design an approach that utilizes a deep neural network to accelerate convergence via data-driven improvement of the search directions. Our method leverages a carefully chosen convolutional network to approximate the action of the inverse of the linear operator up to an arbitrary constant. We train the network using unsupervised learning with a loss function equal to the L^2 difference between an input and the system matrix times the network evaluation, where the unspecified constant in the approximate inverse is accounted for. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on spatially discretized Poisson equations with millions of degrees of freedom arising in computational fluid dynamics applications. Unlike state-of-the-art learning approaches, our algorithm is capable of reducing the linear system residual to a given tolerance in a small number of iterations, independent of the problem size. Moreover, our method generalizes effectively to various systems beyond those encountered during training.
PULASki: Learning inter-rater variability using statistical distances to improve probabilistic segmentation
In the domain of medical imaging, many supervised learning based methods for segmentation face several challenges such as high variability in annotations from multiple experts, paucity of labelled data and class imbalanced datasets. These issues may result in segmentations that lack the requisite precision for clinical analysis and can be misleadingly overconfident without associated uncertainty quantification. We propose the PULASki for biomedical image segmentation that accurately captures variability in expert annotations, even in small datasets. Our approach makes use of an improved loss function based on statistical distances in a conditional variational autoencoder structure (Probabilistic UNet), which improves learning of the conditional decoder compared to the standard cross-entropy particularly in class imbalanced problems. We analyse our method for two structurally different segmentation tasks (intracranial vessel and multiple sclerosis (MS) lesion) and compare our results to four well-established baselines in terms of quantitative metrics and qualitative output. Empirical results demonstrate the PULASKi method outperforms all baselines at the 5\% significance level. The generated segmentations are shown to be much more anatomically plausible than in the 2D case, particularly for the vessel task. Our method can also be applied to a wide range of multi-label segmentation tasks and and is useful for downstream tasks such as hemodynamic modelling (computational fluid dynamics and data assimilation), clinical decision making, and treatment planning.
Learning Flexible Body Collision Dynamics with Hierarchical Contact Mesh Transformer
Recently, many mesh-based graph neural network (GNN) models have been proposed for modeling complex high-dimensional physical systems. Remarkable achievements have been made in significantly reducing the solving time compared to traditional numerical solvers. These methods are typically designed to i) reduce the computational cost in solving physical dynamics and/or ii) propose techniques to enhance the solution accuracy in fluid and rigid body dynamics. However, it remains under-explored whether they are effective in addressing the challenges of flexible body dynamics, where instantaneous collisions occur within a very short timeframe. In this paper, we present Hierarchical Contact Mesh Transformer (HCMT), which uses hierarchical mesh structures and can learn long-range dependencies (occurred by collisions) among spatially distant positions of a body -- two close positions in a higher-level mesh correspond to two distant positions in a lower-level mesh. HCMT enables long-range interactions, and the hierarchical mesh structure quickly propagates collision effects to faraway positions. To this end, it consists of a contact mesh Transformer and a hierarchical mesh Transformer (CMT and HMT, respectively). Lastly, we propose a flexible body dynamics dataset, consisting of trajectories that reflect experimental settings frequently used in the display industry for product designs. We also compare the performance of several baselines using well-known benchmark datasets. Our results show that HCMT provides significant performance improvements over existing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/yuyudeep/hcmt.
Space and Time Continuous Physics Simulation From Partial Observations
Modern techniques for physical simulations rely on numerical schemes and mesh-refinement methods to address trade-offs between precision and complexity, but these handcrafted solutions are tedious and require high computational power. Data-driven methods based on large-scale machine learning promise high adaptivity by integrating long-range dependencies more directly and efficiently. In this work, we focus on fluid dynamics and address the shortcomings of a large part of the literature, which are based on fixed support for computations and predictions in the form of regular or irregular grids. We propose a novel setup to perform predictions in a continuous spatial and temporal domain while being trained on sparse observations. We formulate the task as a double observation problem and propose a solution with two interlinked dynamical systems defined on, respectively, the sparse positions and the continuous domain, which allows to forecast and interpolate a solution from the initial condition. Our practical implementation involves recurrent GNNs and a spatio-temporal attention observer capable of interpolating the solution at arbitrary locations. Our model not only generalizes to new initial conditions (as standard auto-regressive models do) but also performs evaluation at arbitrary space and time locations. We evaluate on three standard datasets in fluid dynamics and compare to strong baselines, which are outperformed both in classical settings and in the extended new task requiring continuous predictions.
PROSE-FD: A Multimodal PDE Foundation Model for Learning Multiple Operators for Forecasting Fluid Dynamics
We propose PROSE-FD, a zero-shot multimodal PDE foundational model for simultaneous prediction of heterogeneous two-dimensional physical systems related to distinct fluid dynamics settings. These systems include shallow water equations and the Navier-Stokes equations with incompressible and compressible flow, regular and complex geometries, and different buoyancy settings. This work presents a new transformer-based multi-operator learning approach that fuses symbolic information to perform operator-based data prediction, i.e. non-autoregressive. By incorporating multiple modalities in the inputs, the PDE foundation model builds in a pathway for including mathematical descriptions of the physical behavior. We pre-train our foundation model on 6 parametric families of equations collected from 13 datasets, including over 60K trajectories. Our model outperforms popular operator learning, computer vision, and multi-physics models, in benchmark forward prediction tasks. We test our architecture choices with ablation studies.
A Neural PDE Solver with Temporal Stencil Modeling
Numerical simulation of non-linear partial differential equations plays a crucial role in modeling physical science and engineering phenomena, such as weather, climate, and aerodynamics. Recent Machine Learning (ML) models trained on low-resolution spatio-temporal signals have shown new promises in capturing important dynamics in high-resolution signals, under the condition that the models can effectively recover the missing details. However, this study shows that significant information is often lost in the low-resolution down-sampled features. To address such issues, we propose a new approach, namely Temporal Stencil Modeling (TSM), which combines the strengths of advanced time-series sequence modeling (with the HiPPO features) and state-of-the-art neural PDE solvers (with learnable stencil modeling). TSM aims to recover the lost information from the PDE trajectories and can be regarded as a temporal generalization of classic finite volume methods such as WENO. Our experimental results show that TSM achieves the new state-of-the-art simulation accuracy for 2-D incompressible Navier-Stokes turbulent flows: it significantly outperforms the previously reported best results by 19.9% in terms of the highly-correlated duration time and reduces the inference latency into 80%. We also show a strong generalization ability of the proposed method to various out-of-distribution turbulent flow settings. Our code is available at "https://github.com/Edward-Sun/TSM-PDE".
Symmetric Basis Convolutions for Learning Lagrangian Fluid Mechanics
Learning physical simulations has been an essential and central aspect of many recent research efforts in machine learning, particularly for Navier-Stokes-based fluid mechanics. Classic numerical solvers have traditionally been computationally expensive and challenging to use in inverse problems, whereas Neural solvers aim to address both concerns through machine learning. We propose a general formulation for continuous convolutions using separable basis functions as a superset of existing methods and evaluate a large set of basis functions in the context of (a) a compressible 1D SPH simulation, (b) a weakly compressible 2D SPH simulation, and (c) an incompressible 2D SPH Simulation. We demonstrate that even and odd symmetries included in the basis functions are key aspects of stability and accuracy. Our broad evaluation shows that Fourier-based continuous convolutions outperform all other architectures regarding accuracy and generalization. Finally, using these Fourier-based networks, we show that prior inductive biases, such as window functions, are no longer necessary. An implementation of our approach, as well as complete datasets and solver implementations, is available at https://github.com/tum-pbs/SFBC.
LESnets (Large-Eddy Simulation nets): Physics-informed neural operator for large-eddy simulation of turbulence
Acquisition of large datasets for three-dimensional (3D) partial differential equations are usually very expensive. Physics-informed neural operator (PINO) eliminates the high costs associated with generation of training datasets, and shows great potential in a variety of partial differential equations. In this work, we employ physics-informed neural operator, encoding the large-eddy simulation (LES) equations directly into the neural operator for simulating three-dimensional incompressible turbulent flows. We develop the LESnets (Large-Eddy Simulation nets) by adding large-eddy simulation equations to two different data-driven models, including Fourier neural operator (FNO) and implicit Fourier neural operator (IFNO) without using label data. Notably, by leveraging only PDE constraints to learn the spatio-temporal dynamics problem, LESnets retains the computational efficiency of data-driven approaches while obviating the necessity for data. Meanwhile, using large-eddy simulation equations as PDE constraints makes it possible to efficiently predict complex turbulence at coarse grids. We investigate the performance of the LESnets with two standard three-dimensional turbulent flows: decaying homogeneous isotropic turbulence and temporally evolving turbulent mixing layer. In the numerical experiments, the LESnets model shows a similar or even better accuracy as compared to traditional large-eddy simulation and data-driven models of FNO and IFNO. Moreover, the well-trained LESnets is significantly faster than traditional LES, and has a similar efficiency as the data-driven FNO and IFNO models. Thus, physics-informed neural operators have a strong potential for 3D nonlinear engineering applications.
Message Passing Neural PDE Solvers
The numerical solution of partial differential equations (PDEs) is difficult, having led to a century of research so far. Recently, there have been pushes to build neural--numerical hybrid solvers, which piggy-backs the modern trend towards fully end-to-end learned systems. Most works so far can only generalize over a subset of properties to which a generic solver would be faced, including: resolution, topology, geometry, boundary conditions, domain discretization regularity, dimensionality, etc. In this work, we build a solver, satisfying these properties, where all the components are based on neural message passing, replacing all heuristically designed components in the computation graph with backprop-optimized neural function approximators. We show that neural message passing solvers representationally contain some classical methods, such as finite differences, finite volumes, and WENO schemes. In order to encourage stability in training autoregressive models, we put forward a method that is based on the principle of zero-stability, posing stability as a domain adaptation problem. We validate our method on various fluid-like flow problems, demonstrating fast, stable, and accurate performance across different domain topologies, equation parameters, discretizations, etc., in 1D and 2D.
Implicit factorized transformer approach to fast prediction of turbulent channel flows
Transformer neural operators have recently become an effective approach for surrogate modeling of systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). In this paper, we introduce a modified implicit factorized transformer (IFactFormer-m) model which replaces the original chained factorized attention with parallel factorized attention. The IFactFormer-m model successfully performs long-term predictions for turbulent channel flow, whereas the original IFactFormer (IFactFormer-o), Fourier neural operator (FNO), and implicit Fourier neural operator (IFNO) exhibit a poor performance. Turbulent channel flows are simulated by direct numerical simulation using fine grids at friction Reynolds numbers Re_{tau}approx 180,395,590, and filtered to coarse grids for training neural operator. The neural operator takes the current flow field as input and predicts the flow field at the next time step, and long-term prediction is achieved in the posterior through an autoregressive approach. The results show that IFactFormer-m, compared to other neural operators and the traditional large eddy simulation (LES) methods including dynamic Smagorinsky model (DSM) and the wall-adapted local eddy-viscosity (WALE) model, reduces prediction errors in the short term, and achieves stable and accurate long-term prediction of various statistical properties and flow structures, including the energy spectrum, mean streamwise velocity, root mean square (rms) values of fluctuating velocities, Reynolds shear stress, and spatial structures of instantaneous velocity. Moreover, the trained IFactFormer-m is much faster than traditional LES methods. By analyzing the attention kernels, we elucidate the reasons why IFactFormer-m converges faster and achieves a stable and accurate long-term prediction compared to IFactFormer-o. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/huiyu-2002/IFactFormer-m.
Implicit Neural Spatial Representations for Time-dependent PDEs
Implicit Neural Spatial Representation (INSR) has emerged as an effective representation of spatially-dependent vector fields. This work explores solving time-dependent PDEs with INSR. Classical PDE solvers introduce both temporal and spatial discretizations. Common spatial discretizations include meshes and meshless point clouds, where each degree-of-freedom corresponds to a location in space. While these explicit spatial correspondences are intuitive to model and understand, these representations are not necessarily optimal for accuracy, memory usage, or adaptivity. Keeping the classical temporal discretization unchanged (e.g., explicit/implicit Euler), we explore INSR as an alternative spatial discretization, where spatial information is implicitly stored in the neural network weights. The network weights then evolve over time via time integration. Our approach does not require any training data generated by existing solvers because our approach is the solver itself. We validate our approach on various PDEs with examples involving large elastic deformations, turbulent fluids, and multi-scale phenomena. While slower to compute than traditional representations, our approach exhibits higher accuracy and lower memory consumption. Whereas classical solvers can dynamically adapt their spatial representation only by resorting to complex remeshing algorithms, our INSR approach is intrinsically adaptive. By tapping into the rich literature of classic time integrators, e.g., operator-splitting schemes, our method enables challenging simulations in contact mechanics and turbulent flows where previous neural-physics approaches struggle. Videos and codes are available on the project page: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/INSR-PDE/
EuLagNet: Eulerian Fluid Prediction with Lagrangian Dynamics
Accurately predicting the future fluid is important to extensive areas, such as meteorology, oceanology and aerodynamics. However, since the fluid is usually observed from an Eulerian perspective, its active and intricate dynamics are seriously obscured and confounded in static grids, bringing horny challenges to the prediction. This paper introduces a new Lagrangian-guided paradigm to tackle the tanglesome fluid dynamics. Instead of solely predicting the future based on Eulerian observations, we propose the Eulerian-Lagrangian Dual Recurrent Network (EuLagNet), which captures multiscale fluid dynamics by tracking movements of adaptively sampled key particles on multiple scales and integrating dynamics information over time. Concretely, a EuLag Block is presented to communicate the learned Eulerian and Lagrangian features at each moment and scale, where the motion of tracked particles is inferred from Eulerian observations and their accumulated dynamics information is incorporated into Eulerian fields to guide future prediction. Tracking key particles not only provides a clear and interpretable clue for fluid dynamics but also makes our model free from modeling complex correlations among massive grids for better efficiency. Experimentally, EuLagNet excels in three challenging fluid prediction tasks, covering both 2D and 3D, simulated and real-world fluids.
Fully Compressible Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations of Solar Convection Zones with CHORUS++
The objective of this study is to develop a fully compressible magnetohydrodynamic solver for fast simulations of the global dynamo of the Sun using unstructured grids and GPUs. Accurate modeling of the Sun's convective layers is vital to predicting the Sun's behavior, including the solar dynamo and sunspot cycles. Currently, there are many efficient codes capable of conducting these large simulations; however, many assume an anealastic density distribution. The anelastic assumption is capable of producing accurate results for low mach numbers; however, it fails in regions with a higher mach number and a fully compressible flow must be considered. To avoid these issues, Wang et al. [1] created a Compressible High-ORder Unstructured Spectral difference (CHORUS) code for simulating fluid dynamics inside stars and planets. CHORUS++ augmented the CHORUS code to adopt a higher degree of polynomials by using cubed-sphere meshing and transfinite mapping to perform simulations on unstructured grids [2]. Recently, CHORUS++ was further developed for parallel magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) solutions on GPUs at Clarkson University. In this study the solar benchmark problems presented by Chen et al. [2] are extended to unsteady solar dynamo problems, with two different density scale heights. The CHORUS-MHD code is further accelerated by multiple GPUs and used to successfully solve these solar dynamo benchmark problems. [1] Wang, J., Liang, C., and Miesch, M. S., "A Compressible High-Order Unstructured Spectral Difference Code for Stratified Convection in Rotating Spherical Shells," Journal of Computational Physics, Vol. 290, 2015, pp. 90-111. [2] Chen, K., Liang, C., and Wan, M., "Arbitrarily high-order accurate simulations of compressible rotationally constrained convection using a transfinite mapping on cubed-sphere grids," Physics of Fluids, Vol. 35, 2023, p. 086120.
Lagrangian basis method for dimensionality reduction of convection dominated nonlinear flows
Foundations of a new projection-based model reduction approach for convection dominated nonlinear fluid flows are summarized. In this method the evolution of the flow is approximated in the Lagrangian frame of reference. Global basis functions are used to approximate both the state and the position of the Lagrangian computational domain. It is demonstrated that in this framework, certain wave-like solutions exhibit low-rank structure and thus, can be efficiently compressed using relatively few global basis. The proposed approach is successfully demonstrated for the reduction of several simple but representative problems.
PDE-Refiner: Achieving Accurate Long Rollouts with Neural PDE Solvers
Time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) are ubiquitous in science and engineering. Recently, mostly due to the high computational cost of traditional solution techniques, deep neural network based surrogates have gained increased interest. The practical utility of such neural PDE solvers relies on their ability to provide accurate, stable predictions over long time horizons, which is a notoriously hard problem. In this work, we present a large-scale analysis of common temporal rollout strategies, identifying the neglect of non-dominant spatial frequency information, often associated with high frequencies in PDE solutions, as the primary pitfall limiting stable, accurate rollout performance. Based on these insights, we draw inspiration from recent advances in diffusion models to introduce PDE-Refiner; a novel model class that enables more accurate modeling of all frequency components via a multistep refinement process. We validate PDE-Refiner on challenging benchmarks of complex fluid dynamics, demonstrating stable and accurate rollouts that consistently outperform state-of-the-art models, including neural, numerical, and hybrid neural-numerical architectures. We further demonstrate that PDE-Refiner greatly enhances data efficiency, since the denoising objective implicitly induces a novel form of spectral data augmentation. Finally, PDE-Refiner's connection to diffusion models enables an accurate and efficient assessment of the model's predictive uncertainty, allowing us to estimate when the surrogate becomes inaccurate.
Momentum transfer in the outflow cycle of a Synthetic jet: Comparison between a developed flow and an LE model
In the literature, flows produced by synthetic jets (SJ) have been studied extensively through experiments and numeric simulations. The essential physics of such a complex system has been simplified successfully to Lumped-element models in a wide range of conditions. LE models effectively predict the pressure in the cavity and the velocity in the neck of SJ. But, this does not comprise the complete dynamics of SJ. As soon as the flow starts separating from the neck of the SJ device, vortices and jets form at some distance downstream. These structures are the result of loosening the flow boundaries. Despite such a dramatic change, predictions of LE models remain unverified by measurements of the fully developed jet. We compared predictions of momentum transfer using an LE model with measurements of size and velocity of a fully developed jet/vortex detached from an SJ. Our SJ device operated with air as an active fluid. Comparing measurements and predictions, we found a constant difference for the higher sound pressures. However, the predictions and the measurements follow similar trends. Additionally, we found that the decay rate of the flow regime given by the relationship between the Reynolds and the Strouhal numbers differs significantly when the flow is studied within the neck and downstream the cavity.
Lagrangian Flow Networks for Conservation Laws
We introduce Lagrangian Flow Networks (LFlows) for modeling fluid densities and velocities continuously in space and time. By construction, the proposed LFlows satisfy the continuity equation, a PDE describing mass conservation in its differentiable form. Our model is based on the insight that solutions to the continuity equation can be expressed as time-dependent density transformations via differentiable and invertible maps. This follows from classical theory of the existence and uniqueness of Lagrangian flows for smooth vector fields. Hence, we model fluid densities by transforming a base density with parameterized diffeomorphisms conditioned on time. The key benefit compared to methods relying on numerical ODE solvers or PINNs is that the analytic expression of the velocity is always consistent with changes in density. Furthermore, we require neither expensive numerical solvers, nor additional penalties to enforce the PDE. LFlows show higher predictive accuracy in density modeling tasks compared to competing models in 2D and 3D, while being computationally efficient. As a real-world application, we model bird migration based on sparse weather radar measurements.
Spectral-Refiner: Fine-Tuning of Accurate Spatiotemporal Neural Operator for Turbulent Flows
Recent advancements in operator-type neural networks have shown promising results in approximating the solutions of spatiotemporal Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). However, these neural networks often entail considerable training expenses, and may not always achieve the desired accuracy required in many scientific and engineering disciplines. In this paper, we propose a new Spatiotemporal Fourier Neural Operator (SFNO) that learns maps between Bochner spaces, and a new learning framework to address these issues. This new paradigm leverages wisdom from traditional numerical PDE theory and techniques to refine the pipeline of commonly adopted end-to-end neural operator training and evaluations. Specifically, in the learning problems for the turbulent flow modeling by the Navier-Stokes Equations (NSE), the proposed architecture initiates the training with a few epochs for SFNO, concluding with the freezing of most model parameters. Then, the last linear spectral convolution layer is fine-tuned without the frequency truncation. The optimization uses a negative Sobolev norm for the first time as the loss in operator learning, defined through a reliable functional-type a posteriori error estimator whose evaluation is almost exact thanks to the Parseval identity. This design allows the neural operators to effectively tackle low-frequency errors while the relief of the de-aliasing filter addresses high-frequency errors. Numerical experiments on commonly used benchmarks for the 2D NSE demonstrate significant improvements in both computational efficiency and accuracy, compared to end-to-end evaluation and traditional numerical PDE solvers.
Physics-aware registration based auto-encoder for convection dominated PDEs
We design a physics-aware auto-encoder to specifically reduce the dimensionality of solutions arising from convection-dominated nonlinear physical systems. Although existing nonlinear manifold learning methods seem to be compelling tools to reduce the dimensionality of data characterized by a large Kolmogorov n-width, they typically lack a straightforward mapping from the latent space to the high-dimensional physical space. Moreover, the realized latent variables are often hard to interpret. Therefore, many of these methods are often dismissed in the reduced order modeling of dynamical systems governed by the partial differential equations (PDEs). Accordingly, we propose an auto-encoder type nonlinear dimensionality reduction algorithm. The unsupervised learning problem trains a diffeomorphic spatio-temporal grid, that registers the output sequence of the PDEs on a non-uniform parameter/time-varying grid, such that the Kolmogorov n-width of the mapped data on the learned grid is minimized. We demonstrate the efficacy and interpretability of our approach to separate convection/advection from diffusion/scaling on various manufactured and physical systems.
Training Deep Surrogate Models with Large Scale Online Learning
The spatiotemporal resolution of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) plays important roles in the mathematical description of the world's physical phenomena. In general, scientists and engineers solve PDEs numerically by the use of computationally demanding solvers. Recently, deep learning algorithms have emerged as a viable alternative for obtaining fast solutions for PDEs. Models are usually trained on synthetic data generated by solvers, stored on disk and read back for training. This paper advocates that relying on a traditional static dataset to train these models does not allow the full benefit of the solver to be used as a data generator. It proposes an open source online training framework for deep surrogate models. The framework implements several levels of parallelism focused on simultaneously generating numerical simulations and training deep neural networks. This approach suppresses the I/O and storage bottleneck associated with disk-loaded datasets, and opens the way to training on significantly larger datasets. Experiments compare the offline and online training of four surrogate models, including state-of-the-art architectures. Results indicate that exposing deep surrogate models to more dataset diversity, up to hundreds of GB, can increase model generalization capabilities. Fully connected neural networks, Fourier Neural Operator (FNO), and Message Passing PDE Solver prediction accuracy is improved by 68%, 16% and 7%, respectively.
Neural Operator: Is data all you need to model the world? An insight into the impact of Physics Informed Machine Learning
Numerical approximations of partial differential equations (PDEs) are routinely employed to formulate the solution of physics, engineering and mathematical problems involving functions of several variables, such as the propagation of heat or sound, fluid flow, elasticity, electrostatics, electrodynamics, and more. While this has led to solving many complex phenomena, there are some limitations. Conventional approaches such as Finite Element Methods (FEMs) and Finite Differential Methods (FDMs) require considerable time and are computationally expensive. In contrast, data driven machine learning-based methods such as neural networks provide a faster, fairly accurate alternative, and have certain advantages such as discretization invariance and resolution invariance. This article aims to provide a comprehensive insight into how data-driven approaches can complement conventional techniques to solve engineering and physics problems, while also noting some of the major pitfalls of machine learning-based approaches. Furthermore, we highlight, a novel and fast machine learning-based approach (~1000x) to learning the solution operator of a PDE operator learning. We will note how these new computational approaches can bring immense advantages in tackling many problems in fundamental and applied physics.
Transform Once: Efficient Operator Learning in Frequency Domain
Spectral analysis provides one of the most effective paradigms for information-preserving dimensionality reduction, as simple descriptions of naturally occurring signals are often obtained via few terms of periodic basis functions. In this work, we study deep neural networks designed to harness the structure in frequency domain for efficient learning of long-range correlations in space or time: frequency-domain models (FDMs). Existing FDMs are based on complex-valued transforms i.e. Fourier Transforms (FT), and layers that perform computation on the spectrum and input data separately. This design introduces considerable computational overhead: for each layer, a forward and inverse FT. Instead, this work introduces a blueprint for frequency domain learning through a single transform: transform once (T1). To enable efficient, direct learning in the frequency domain we derive a variance-preserving weight initialization scheme and investigate methods for frequency selection in reduced-order FDMs. Our results noticeably streamline the design process of FDMs, pruning redundant transforms, and leading to speedups of 3x to 10x that increase with data resolution and model size. We perform extensive experiments on learning the solution operator of spatio-temporal dynamics, including incompressible Navier-Stokes, turbulent flows around airfoils and high-resolution video of smoke. T1 models improve on the test performance of FDMs while requiring significantly less computation (5 hours instead of 32 for our large-scale experiment), with over 20% reduction in average predictive error across tasks.
An Old-Fashioned Framework for Machine Learning in Turbulence Modeling
The objective is to provide clear and well-motivated guidance to Machine Learning (ML) teams, founded on our experience in empirical turbulence modeling. Guidance is also needed for modeling outside ML. ML is not yet successful in turbulence modeling, and many papers have produced unusable proposals either due to errors in math or physics, or to severe overfitting. We believe that "Turbulence Culture" (TC) takes years to learn and is difficult to convey especially considering the modern lack of time for careful study; important facts which are self-evident after a career in turbulence research and modeling and extensive reading are easy to miss. In addition, many of them are not absolute facts, a consequence of the gaps in our understanding of turbulence and the weak connection of models to first principles. Some of the mathematical facts are rigorous, but the physical aspects often are not. Turbulence models are surprisingly arbitrary. Disagreement between experts confuses the new entrants. In addition, several key properties of the models are ascertained through non-trivial analytical properties of the differential equations, which puts them out of reach of purely data-driven ML-type approaches. The best example is the crucial behavior of the model at the edge of the turbulent region (ETR). The knowledge we wish to put out here may be divided into "Mission" and "Requirements," each combining physics and mathematics. Clear lists of "Hard" and "Soft" constraints are presented. A concrete example of how DNS data could be used, possibly allied with ML, is first carried through and illustrates the large number of decisions needed. Our focus is on creating effective products which will empower CFD, rather than on publications.
FluidLab: A Differentiable Environment for Benchmarking Complex Fluid Manipulation
Humans manipulate various kinds of fluids in their everyday life: creating latte art, scooping floating objects from water, rolling an ice cream cone, etc. Using robots to augment or replace human labors in these daily settings remain as a challenging task due to the multifaceted complexities of fluids. Previous research in robotic fluid manipulation mostly consider fluids governed by an ideal, Newtonian model in simple task settings (e.g., pouring). However, the vast majority of real-world fluid systems manifest their complexities in terms of the fluid's complex material behaviors and multi-component interactions, both of which were well beyond the scope of the current literature. To evaluate robot learning algorithms on understanding and interacting with such complex fluid systems, a comprehensive virtual platform with versatile simulation capabilities and well-established tasks is needed. In this work, we introduce FluidLab, a simulation environment with a diverse set of manipulation tasks involving complex fluid dynamics. These tasks address interactions between solid and fluid as well as among multiple fluids. At the heart of our platform is a fully differentiable physics simulator, FluidEngine, providing GPU-accelerated simulations and gradient calculations for various material types and their couplings. We identify several challenges for fluid manipulation learning by evaluating a set of reinforcement learning and trajectory optimization methods on our platform. To address these challenges, we propose several domain-specific optimization schemes coupled with differentiable physics, which are empirically shown to be effective in tackling optimization problems featured by fluid system's non-convex and non-smooth properties. Furthermore, we demonstrate reasonable sim-to-real transfer by deploying optimized trajectories in real-world settings.
Multiscale Neural Operator: Learning Fast and Grid-independent PDE Solvers
Numerical simulations in climate, chemistry, or astrophysics are computationally too expensive for uncertainty quantification or parameter-exploration at high-resolution. Reduced-order or surrogate models are multiple orders of magnitude faster, but traditional surrogates are inflexible or inaccurate and pure machine learning (ML)-based surrogates too data-hungry. We propose a hybrid, flexible surrogate model that exploits known physics for simulating large-scale dynamics and limits learning to the hard-to-model term, which is called parametrization or closure and captures the effect of fine- onto large-scale dynamics. Leveraging neural operators, we are the first to learn grid-independent, non-local, and flexible parametrizations. Our multiscale neural operator is motivated by a rich literature in multiscale modeling, has quasilinear runtime complexity, is more accurate or flexible than state-of-the-art parametrizations and demonstrated on the chaotic equation multiscale Lorenz96.
Reduced-Order Neural Operators: Learning Lagrangian Dynamics on Highly Sparse Graphs
We present a neural operator architecture to simulate Lagrangian dynamics, such as fluid flow, granular flows, and elastoplasticity. Traditional numerical methods, such as the finite element method (FEM), suffer from long run times and large memory consumption. On the other hand, approaches based on graph neural networks are faster but still suffer from long computation times on dense graphs, which are often required for high-fidelity simulations. Our model, GIOROM or Graph Interaction Operator for Reduced-Order Modeling, learns temporal dynamics within a reduced-order setting, capturing spatial features from a highly sparse graph representation of the input and generalizing to arbitrary spatial locations during inference. The model is geometry-aware and discretization-agnostic and can generalize to different initial conditions, velocities, and geometries after training. We show that point clouds of the order of 100,000 points can be inferred from sparse graphs with sim1000 points, with negligible change in computation time. We empirically evaluate our model on elastic solids, Newtonian fluids, Non-Newtonian fluids, Drucker-Prager granular flows, and von Mises elastoplasticity. On these benchmarks, our approach results in a 25times speedup compared to other neural network-based physics simulators while delivering high-fidelity predictions of complex physical systems and showing better performance on most benchmarks. The code and the demos are provided at https://github.com/HrishikeshVish/GIOROM.
MGARD: A multigrid framework for high-performance, error-controlled data compression and refactoring
We describe MGARD, a software providing MultiGrid Adaptive Reduction for floating-point scientific data on structured and unstructured grids. With exceptional data compression capability and precise error control, MGARD addresses a wide range of requirements, including storage reduction, high-performance I/O, and in-situ data analysis. It features a unified application programming interface (API) that seamlessly operates across diverse computing architectures. MGARD has been optimized with highly-tuned GPU kernels and efficient memory and device management mechanisms, ensuring scalable and rapid operations.
Towards Universal Mesh Movement Networks
Solving complex Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) accurately and efficiently is an essential and challenging problem in all scientific and engineering disciplines. Mesh movement methods provide the capability to improve the accuracy of the numerical solution without increasing the overall mesh degree of freedom count. Conventional sophisticated mesh movement methods are extremely expensive and struggle to handle scenarios with complex boundary geometries. However, existing learning-based methods require re-training from scratch given a different PDE type or boundary geometry, which limits their applicability, and also often suffer from robustness issues in the form of inverted elements. In this paper, we introduce the Universal Mesh Movement Network (UM2N), which -- once trained -- can be applied in a non-intrusive, zero-shot manner to move meshes with different size distributions and structures, for solvers applicable to different PDE types and boundary geometries. UM2N consists of a Graph Transformer (GT) encoder for extracting features and a Graph Attention Network (GAT) based decoder for moving the mesh. We evaluate our method on advection and Navier-Stokes based examples, as well as a real-world tsunami simulation case. Our method outperforms existing learning-based mesh movement methods in terms of the benchmarks described above. In comparison to the conventional sophisticated Monge-Amp\`ere PDE-solver based method, our approach not only significantly accelerates mesh movement, but also proves effective in scenarios where the conventional method fails. Our project page is at https://erizmr.github.io/UM2N/.
Diffusion Generative Inverse Design
Inverse design refers to the problem of optimizing the input of an objective function in order to enact a target outcome. For many real-world engineering problems, the objective function takes the form of a simulator that predicts how the system state will evolve over time, and the design challenge is to optimize the initial conditions that lead to a target outcome. Recent developments in learned simulation have shown that graph neural networks (GNNs) can be used for accurate, efficient, differentiable estimation of simulator dynamics, and support high-quality design optimization with gradient- or sampling-based optimization procedures. However, optimizing designs from scratch requires many expensive model queries, and these procedures exhibit basic failures on either non-convex or high-dimensional problems.In this work, we show how denoising diffusion models (DDMs) can be used to solve inverse design problems efficiently and propose a particle sampling algorithm for further improving their efficiency. We perform experiments on a number of fluid dynamics design challenges, and find that our approach substantially reduces the number of calls to the simulator compared to standard techniques.
Text2PDE: Latent Diffusion Models for Accessible Physics Simulation
Recent advances in deep learning have inspired numerous works on data-driven solutions to partial differential equation (PDE) problems. These neural PDE solvers can often be much faster than their numerical counterparts; however, each presents its unique limitations and generally balances training cost, numerical accuracy, and ease of applicability to different problem setups. To address these limitations, we introduce several methods to apply latent diffusion models to physics simulation. Firstly, we introduce a mesh autoencoder to compress arbitrarily discretized PDE data, allowing for efficient diffusion training across various physics. Furthermore, we investigate full spatio-temporal solution generation to mitigate autoregressive error accumulation. Lastly, we investigate conditioning on initial physical quantities, as well as conditioning solely on a text prompt to introduce text2PDE generation. We show that language can be a compact, interpretable, and accurate modality for generating physics simulations, paving the way for more usable and accessible PDE solvers. Through experiments on both uniform and structured grids, we show that the proposed approach is competitive with current neural PDE solvers in both accuracy and efficiency, with promising scaling behavior up to sim3 billion parameters. By introducing a scalable, accurate, and usable physics simulator, we hope to bring neural PDE solvers closer to practical use.
Learning large scale industrial physics simulations
In an industrial group like Safran, numerical simulations of physical phenomena are integral to most design processes. At Safran's corporate research center, we enhance these processes by developing fast and reliable surrogate models for various physics. We focus here on two technologies developed in recent years. The first is a physical reduced-order modeling method for non-linear structural mechanics and thermal analysis, used for calculating the lifespan of high-pressure turbine blades and performing heat analysis of high-pressure compressors. The second technology involves learning physics simulations with non-parameterized geometrical variability using classical machine learning tools, such as Gaussian process regression. Finally, we present our contributions to the open-source and open-data community.
NeuralStagger: Accelerating Physics-constrained Neural PDE Solver with Spatial-temporal Decomposition
Neural networks have shown great potential in accelerating the solution of partial differential equations (PDEs). Recently, there has been a growing interest in introducing physics constraints into training neural PDE solvers to reduce the use of costly data and improve the generalization ability. However, these physics constraints, based on certain finite dimensional approximations over the function space, must resolve the smallest scaled physics to ensure the accuracy and stability of the simulation, resulting in high computational costs from large input, output, and neural networks. This paper proposes a general acceleration methodology called NeuralStagger by spatially and temporally decomposing the original learning tasks into several coarser-resolution subtasks. We define a coarse-resolution neural solver for each subtask, which requires fewer computational resources, and jointly train them with the vanilla physics-constrained loss by simply arranging their outputs to reconstruct the original solution. Due to the perfect parallelism between them, the solution is achieved as fast as a coarse-resolution neural solver. In addition, the trained solvers bring the flexibility of simulating with multiple levels of resolution. We demonstrate the successful application of NeuralStagger on 2D and 3D fluid dynamics simulations, which leads to an additional 10sim100times speed-up. Moreover, the experiment also shows that the learned model could be well used for optimal control.
Mesh motion in fluid-structure interaction with deep operator networks
A mesh motion model based on deep operator networks is presented. The model is trained on and evaluated against a biharmonic mesh motion model on a fluid-structure interaction benchmark problem and further evaluated in a setting where biharmonic mesh motion fails. The performance of the proposed mesh motion model is comparable to the biharmonic mesh motion on the test problems.
Incorporating Riemannian Geometric Features for Learning Coefficient of Pressure Distributions on Airplane Wings
The aerodynamic coefficients of aircrafts are significantly impacted by its geometry, especially when the angle of attack (AoA) is large. In the field of aerodynamics, traditional polynomial-based parameterization uses as few parameters as possible to describe the geometry of an airfoil. However, because the 3D geometry of a wing is more complicated than the 2D airfoil, polynomial-based parameterizations have difficulty in accurately representing the entire shape of a wing in 3D space. Existing deep learning-based methods can extract massive latent neural representations for the shape of 2D airfoils or 2D slices of wings. Recent studies highlight that directly taking geometric features as inputs to the neural networks can improve the accuracy of predicted aerodynamic coefficients. Motivated by geometry theory, we propose to incorporate Riemannian geometric features for learning Coefficient of Pressure (CP) distributions on wing surfaces. Our method calculates geometric features (Riemannian metric, connection, and curvature) and further inputs the geometric features, coordinates and flight conditions into a deep learning model to predict the CP distribution. Experimental results show that our method, compared to state-of-the-art Deep Attention Network (DAN), reduces the predicted mean square error (MSE) of CP by an average of 8.41% for the DLR-F11 aircraft test set.
A domain splitting strategy for solving PDEs
In this work we develop a novel domain splitting strategy for the solution of partial differential equations. Focusing on a uniform discretization of the d-dimensional advection-diffusion equation, our proposal is a two-level algorithm that merges the solutions obtained from the discretization of the equation over highly anisotropic submeshes to compute an initial approximation of the fine solution. The algorithm then iteratively refines the initial guess by leveraging the structure of the residual. Performing costly calculations on anisotropic submeshes enable us to reduce the dimensionality of the problem by one, and the merging process, which involves the computation of solutions over disjoint domains, allows for parallel implementation.
PDEformer: Towards a Foundation Model for One-Dimensional Partial Differential Equations
This paper introduces PDEformer, a neural solver for partial differential equations (PDEs) capable of simultaneously addressing various types of PDEs. We advocate representing the PDE in the form of a computational graph, facilitating the seamless integration of both symbolic and numerical information inherent in a PDE. A graph Transformer and an implicit neural representation (INR) are employed to generate mesh-free predicted solutions. Following pretraining on data exhibiting a certain level of diversity, our model achieves zero-shot accuracies on benchmark datasets that surpass those of adequately trained expert models. Additionally, PDEformer demonstrates promising results in the inverse problem of PDE coefficient recovery.
Random Grid Neural Processes for Parametric Partial Differential Equations
We introduce a new class of spatially stochastic physics and data informed deep latent models for parametric partial differential equations (PDEs) which operate through scalable variational neural processes. We achieve this by assigning probability measures to the spatial domain, which allows us to treat collocation grids probabilistically as random variables to be marginalised out. Adapting this spatial statistics view, we solve forward and inverse problems for parametric PDEs in a way that leads to the construction of Gaussian process models of solution fields. The implementation of these random grids poses a unique set of challenges for inverse physics informed deep learning frameworks and we propose a new architecture called Grid Invariant Convolutional Networks (GICNets) to overcome these challenges. We further show how to incorporate noisy data in a principled manner into our physics informed model to improve predictions for problems where data may be available but whose measurement location does not coincide with any fixed mesh or grid. The proposed method is tested on a nonlinear Poisson problem, Burgers equation, and Navier-Stokes equations, and we provide extensive numerical comparisons. We demonstrate significant computational advantages over current physics informed neural learning methods for parametric PDEs while improving the predictive capabilities and flexibility of these models.
Lagrangian Coherent Track Initialisation (LCTI)
Advances in time-resolved Particle Tracking Velocimetry (4D-PTV) techniques have been consistently revealed more accurate Lagrangian particle motions. A novel track initialisation technique as a complementary part of 4D-PTV, based on local temporal and spatial coherency of neighbour trajectories, is proposed. The proposed Lagrangian Coherent Track Initialisation (LCTI) applies physics-based Finite Time Lyapunov Exponent (FTLE) to build four frame coherent tracks. We locally determine the boundaries (i.e., ridges) of Lagrangian Coherent Structures (LCS) among neighbour trajectories by using FTLE to distinguish clusters of coherent motions. To evaluate the proposed technique, we created an open-access synthetic Lagrangian and Eulerian dataset of the wake downstream of a smooth cylinder at a Reynolds number equal to 3900 obtained from 3D Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS). The dataset is available to the public. Performance of the proposed method based on three characteristic parameters, temporal scale, particle concentration (i.e., density), and noise ratio, showed robust behaviour in finding true tracks compared to the recent initialisation algorithms. Sensitivity of LCTI to the number of untracked and wrong tracks are also discussed. We address the capability of using the proposed method as a function of a 4D-PTV scheme in the Lagrangian Particle Tracking challenge for a flow with high particle densities. Finally, the LCTI behaviour was assessed in a real jet impingement experiment. LCTI was found to be a reliable tracking tool in complex flow motions, with a strength revealed for flows with high particle concentrations.
ZipGAN: Super-Resolution-based Generative Adversarial Network Framework for Data Compression of Direct Numerical Simulations
The advancement of high-performance computing has enabled the generation of large direct numerical simulation (DNS) datasets of turbulent flows, driving the need for efficient compression/decompression techniques that reduce storage demands while maintaining fidelity. Traditional methods, such as the discrete wavelet transform, cannot achieve compression ratios of 8 or higher for complex turbulent flows without introducing significant encoding/decoding errors. On the other hand, a super-resolution-based generative adversarial network (SR-GAN), called ZipGAN, can accurately reconstruct fine-scale features, preserving velocity gradients and structural details, even at a compression ratio of 512, thanks to the more efficient representation of the data in compact latent space. Additional benefits are ascribed to adversarial training. The high GAN training time is significantly reduced with a progressive transfer learning approach and, once trained, they can be applied independently of the Reynolds number. It is demonstrated that ZipGAN can enhance dataset temporal resolution without additional simulation overhead by generating high-quality intermediate fields from compressed snapshots. The ZipGAN discriminator can reliably evaluate the quality of decoded fields, ensuring fidelity even in the absence of original DNS fields. Hence, ZipGAN compression/decompression method presents a highly efficient and scalable alternative for large-scale DNS storage and transfer, offering substantial advantages over the DWT methods in terms of compression efficiency, reconstruction fidelity, and temporal resolution enhancement.
Poseidon: Efficient Foundation Models for PDEs
We introduce Poseidon, a foundation model for learning the solution operators of PDEs. It is based on a multiscale operator transformer, with time-conditioned layer norms that enable continuous-in-time evaluations. A novel training strategy leveraging the semi-group property of time-dependent PDEs to allow for significant scaling-up of the training data is also proposed. Poseidon is pretrained on a diverse, large scale dataset for the governing equations of fluid dynamics. It is then evaluated on a suite of 15 challenging downstream tasks that include a wide variety of PDE types and operators. We show that Poseidon exhibits excellent performance across the board by outperforming baselines significantly, both in terms of sample efficiency and accuracy. Poseidon also generalizes very well to new physics that is not seen during pretraining. Moreover, Poseidon scales with respect to model and data size, both for pretraining and for downstream tasks. Taken together, our results showcase the surprising ability of Poseidon to learn effective representations from a very small set of PDEs during pretraining in order to generalize well to unseen and unrelated PDEs downstream, demonstrating its potential as an effective, general purpose PDE foundation model. Finally, the Poseidon model as well as underlying pretraining and downstream datasets are open sourced, with code being available at https://github.com/camlab-ethz/poseidon and pretrained models and datasets at https://huggingface.co/camlab-ethz.
DrivAerNet: A Parametric Car Dataset for Data-Driven Aerodynamic Design and Graph-Based Drag Prediction
This study introduces DrivAerNet, a large-scale high-fidelity CFD dataset of 3D industry-standard car shapes, and RegDGCNN, a dynamic graph convolutional neural network model, both aimed at aerodynamic car design through machine learning. DrivAerNet, with its 4000 detailed 3D car meshes using 0.5 million surface mesh faces and comprehensive aerodynamic performance data comprising of full 3D pressure, velocity fields, and wall-shear stresses, addresses the critical need for extensive datasets to train deep learning models in engineering applications. It is 60\% larger than the previously available largest public dataset of cars, and is the only open-source dataset that also models wheels and underbody. RegDGCNN leverages this large-scale dataset to provide high-precision drag estimates directly from 3D meshes, bypassing traditional limitations such as the need for 2D image rendering or Signed Distance Fields (SDF). By enabling fast drag estimation in seconds, RegDGCNN facilitates rapid aerodynamic assessments, offering a substantial leap towards integrating data-driven methods in automotive design. Together, DrivAerNet and RegDGCNN promise to accelerate the car design process and contribute to the development of more efficient vehicles. To lay the groundwork for future innovations in the field, the dataset and code used in our study are publicly accessible at https://github.com/Mohamedelrefaie/DrivAerNet
Consistent Flow Distillation for Text-to-3D Generation
Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) has made significant strides in distilling image-generative models for 3D generation. However, its maximum-likelihood-seeking behavior often leads to degraded visual quality and diversity, limiting its effectiveness in 3D applications. In this work, we propose Consistent Flow Distillation (CFD), which addresses these limitations. We begin by leveraging the gradient of the diffusion ODE or SDE sampling process to guide the 3D generation. From the gradient-based sampling perspective, we find that the consistency of 2D image flows across different viewpoints is important for high-quality 3D generation. To achieve this, we introduce multi-view consistent Gaussian noise on the 3D object, which can be rendered from various viewpoints to compute the flow gradient. Our experiments demonstrate that CFD, through consistent flows, significantly outperforms previous methods in text-to-3D generation.
On the local analyticity for the Euler equations
In this paper, we study the existence and uniqueness of solutions to the Euler equations with initial conditions that exhibit analytic regularity near the boundary and Sobolev regularity away from it. A key contribution of this work is the introduction of the diamond-analyticity framework, which captures the spatial decay of the analyticity radius in a structured manner, improving upon uniform analyticity approaches. We employ the Leray projection and a nonstandard mollification technique to demonstrate that the quotient between the imaginary and real parts of the analyticity radius remains unrestricted, thus extending the analyticity persistence results beyond traditional constraints. Our methodology combines analytic-Sobolev estimates with an iterative scheme which is nonstandard in the Cauchy-Kowalevskaya framework, ensuring rigorous control over the evolution of the solution. These results contribute to a deeper understanding of the interplay between analyticity and boundary effects in fluid equations. They might have implications for the study of the inviscid limit of the Navier-Stokes equations and the role of complex singularities in fluid dynamics.
Structure-Preserving Operator Learning
Learning complex dynamics driven by partial differential equations directly from data holds great promise for fast and accurate simulations of complex physical systems. In most cases, this problem can be formulated as an operator learning task, where one aims to learn the operator representing the physics of interest, which entails discretization of the continuous system. However, preserving key continuous properties at the discrete level, such as boundary conditions, and addressing physical systems with complex geometries is challenging for most existing approaches. We introduce a family of operator learning architectures, structure-preserving operator networks (SPONs), that allows to preserve key mathematical and physical properties of the continuous system by leveraging finite element (FE) discretizations of the input-output spaces. SPONs are encode-process-decode architectures that are end-to-end differentiable, where the encoder and decoder follows from the discretizations of the input-output spaces. SPONs can operate on complex geometries, enforce certain boundary conditions exactly, and offer theoretical guarantees. Our framework provides a flexible way of devising structure-preserving architectures tailored to specific applications, and offers an explicit trade-off between performance and efficiency, all thanks to the FE discretization of the input-output spaces. Additionally, we introduce a multigrid-inspired SPON architecture that yields improved performance at higher efficiency. Finally, we release a software to automate the design and training of SPON architectures.
Scalable Transformer for PDE Surrogate Modeling
Transformer has shown state-of-the-art performance on various applications and has recently emerged as a promising tool for surrogate modeling of partial differential equations (PDEs). Despite the introduction of linear-complexity variant, applying attention to a large number of grid points can result in instability and is still expensive to compute. In this work, we propose Factorized Transformer(FactFormer), which is based on an axial factorized kernel integral. Concretely, we introduce a learnable projection operator that decomposes the input function into multiple sub-functions with one-dimensional domain. These sub-functions are then evaluated and used to compute the instance-based kernel with an axial factorized scheme. We showcase that the proposed model is able to simulate 2D Kolmogorov flow on a 256 by 256 grid and 3D smoke buoyancy on a 64 by 64 by 64 grid with good accuracy and efficiency. In addition, we find out that with the factorization scheme, the attention matrices enjoy a more compact spectrum than full softmax-free attention matrices.
SURFSUP: Learning Fluid Simulation for Novel Surfaces
Modeling the mechanics of fluid in complex scenes is vital to applications in design, graphics, and robotics. Learning-based methods provide fast and differentiable fluid simulators, however most prior work is unable to accurately model how fluids interact with genuinely novel surfaces not seen during training. We introduce SURFSUP, a framework that represents objects implicitly using signed distance functions (SDFs), rather than an explicit representation of meshes or particles. This continuous representation of geometry enables more accurate simulation of fluid-object interactions over long time periods while simultaneously making computation more efficient. Moreover, SURFSUP trained on simple shape primitives generalizes considerably out-of-distribution, even to complex real-world scenes and objects. Finally, we show we can invert our model to design simple objects to manipulate fluid flow.
Extreme Event Prediction with Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning-based Parametrization of Atmospheric and Oceanic Turbulence
Global climate models (GCMs) are the main tools for understanding and predicting climate change. However, due to limited numerical resolutions, these models suffer from major structural uncertainties; e.g., they cannot resolve critical processes such as small-scale eddies in atmospheric and oceanic turbulence. Thus, such small-scale processes have to be represented as a function of the resolved scales via closures (parametrization). The accuracy of these closures is particularly important for capturing climate extremes. Traditionally, such closures are based on heuristics and simplifying assumptions about the unresolved physics. Recently, supervised-learned closures, trained offline on high-fidelity data, have been shown to outperform the classical physics-based closures. However, this approach requires a significant amount of high-fidelity training data and can also lead to instabilities. Reinforcement learning is emerging as a potent alternative for developing such closures as it requires only low-order statistics and leads to stable closures. In Scientific Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (SMARL) computational elements serve a dual role of discretization points and learning agents. We leverage SMARL and fundamentals of turbulence physics to learn closures for prototypes of atmospheric and oceanic turbulence. The policy is trained using only the enstrophy spectrum, which is nearly invariant and can be estimated from a few high-fidelity samples (these few samples are far from enough for supervised/offline learning). We show that these closures lead to stable low-resolution simulations that, at a fraction of the cost, can reproduce the high-fidelity simulations' statistics, including the tails of the probability density functions. The results demonstrate the high potential of SMARL for closure modeling for GCMs, especially in the regime of scarce data and indirect observations.
The Well: a Large-Scale Collection of Diverse Physics Simulations for Machine Learning
Machine learning based surrogate models offer researchers powerful tools for accelerating simulation-based workflows. However, as standard datasets in this space often cover small classes of physical behavior, it can be difficult to evaluate the efficacy of new approaches. To address this gap, we introduce the Well: a large-scale collection of datasets containing numerical simulations of a wide variety of spatiotemporal physical systems. The Well draws from domain experts and numerical software developers to provide 15TB of data across 16 datasets covering diverse domains such as biological systems, fluid dynamics, acoustic scattering, as well as magneto-hydrodynamic simulations of extra-galactic fluids or supernova explosions. These datasets can be used individually or as part of a broader benchmark suite. To facilitate usage of the Well, we provide a unified PyTorch interface for training and evaluating models. We demonstrate the function of this library by introducing example baselines that highlight the new challenges posed by the complex dynamics of the Well. The code and data is available at https://github.com/PolymathicAI/the_well.
A Nonintrusive Distributed Reduced Order Modeling Framework for nonlinear structural mechanics -- application to elastoviscoplastic computations
In this work, we propose a framework that constructs reduced order models for nonlinear structural mechanics in a nonintrusive fashion, and can handle large scale simulations. We identify three steps that are carried out separately in time, and possibly on different devices: (i) the production of high-fidelity solutions by a commercial software, (ii) the offline stage of the model reduction and (iii) the online stage where the reduced order model is exploited. The nonintrusivity assumes that only the displacement field solution is known, and relies on operations on simulation data during the offline phase by using an in-house code. The compatibility with a new commercial code only needs the implementation of a routine converting the mesh and result format into our in-house data format. The nonintrusive capabilities of the framework are demonstrated on numerical experiments using commercial versions of the finite element softwares Zset and Ansys Mechanical. The nonlinear constitutive equations are evaluated by using the same external plugins as for Zset or Ansys Mechanical. The large scale simulations are handled using domain decomposition and parallel computing with distributed memory. The features and performances of the framework are evaluated on two numerical applications involving elastoviscoplastic materials: the second one involves a model of high-pressure blade, where the framework is used to extrapolate cyclic loadings in 6.5 hours, whereas the reference high-fidelity computation would take 9.5 days.
Machine Learning Global Simulation of Nonlocal Gravity Wave Propagation
Global climate models typically operate at a grid resolution of hundreds of kilometers and fail to resolve atmospheric mesoscale processes, e.g., clouds, precipitation, and gravity waves (GWs). Model representation of these processes and their sources is essential to the global circulation and planetary energy budget, but subgrid scale contributions from these processes are often only approximately represented in models using parameterizations. These parameterizations are subject to approximations and idealizations, which limit their capability and accuracy. The most drastic of these approximations is the "single-column approximation" which completely neglects the horizontal evolution of these processes, resulting in key biases in current climate models. With a focus on atmospheric GWs, we present the first-ever global simulation of atmospheric GW fluxes using machine learning (ML) models trained on the WINDSET dataset to emulate global GW emulation in the atmosphere, as an alternative to traditional single-column parameterizations. Using an Attention U-Net-based architecture trained on globally resolved GW momentum fluxes, we illustrate the importance and effectiveness of global nonlocality, when simulating GWs using data-driven schemes.
Bespoke Solvers for Generative Flow Models
Diffusion or flow-based models are powerful generative paradigms that are notoriously hard to sample as samples are defined as solutions to high-dimensional Ordinary or Stochastic Differential Equations (ODEs/SDEs) which require a large Number of Function Evaluations (NFE) to approximate well. Existing methods to alleviate the costly sampling process include model distillation and designing dedicated ODE solvers. However, distillation is costly to train and sometimes can deteriorate quality, while dedicated solvers still require relatively large NFE to produce high quality samples. In this paper we introduce "Bespoke solvers", a novel framework for constructing custom ODE solvers tailored to the ODE of a given pre-trained flow model. Our approach optimizes an order consistent and parameter-efficient solver (e.g., with 80 learnable parameters), is trained for roughly 1% of the GPU time required for training the pre-trained model, and significantly improves approximation and generation quality compared to dedicated solvers. For example, a Bespoke solver for a CIFAR10 model produces samples with Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) of 2.73 with 10 NFE, and gets to 1% of the Ground Truth (GT) FID (2.59) for this model with only 20 NFE. On the more challenging ImageNet-64times64, Bespoke samples at 2.2 FID with 10 NFE, and gets within 2% of GT FID (1.71) with 20 NFE.
FlamePINN-1D: Physics-informed neural networks to solve forward and inverse problems of 1D laminar flames
Given the existence of various forward and inverse problems in combustion studies and applications that necessitate distinct methods for resolution, a framework to solve them in a unified way is critically needed. A promising approach is the integration of machine learning methods with governing equations of combustion systems, which exhibits superior generality and few-shot learning ability compared to purely data-driven methods. In this work, the FlamePINN-1D framework is proposed to solve the forward and inverse problems of 1D laminar flames based on physics-informed neural networks. Three cases with increasing complexity have been tested: Case 1 are freely-propagating premixed (FPP) flames with simplified physical models, while Case 2 and Case 3 are FPP and counterflow premixed (CFP) flames with detailed models, respectively. For forward problems, FlamePINN-1D aims to solve the flame fields and infer the unknown eigenvalues (such as laminar flame speeds) under the constraints of governing equations and boundary conditions. For inverse problems, FlamePINN-1D aims to reconstruct the continuous fields and infer the unknown parameters (such as transport and chemical kinetics parameters) from noisy sparse observations of the flame. Our results strongly validate these capabilities of FlamePINN-1D across various flames and working conditions. Compared to traditional methods, FlamePINN-1D is differentiable and mesh-free, exhibits no discretization errors, and is easier to implement for inverse problems. The inverse problem results also indicate the possibility of optimizing chemical mechanisms from measurements of laboratory 1D flames. Furthermore, some proposed strategies, such as hard constraints and thin-layer normalization, are proven to be essential for the robust learning of FlamePINN-1D. The code for this paper is partially available at https://github.com/CAME-THU/FlamePINN-1D.
Flow Matching on General Geometries
We propose Riemannian Flow Matching (RFM), a simple yet powerful framework for training continuous normalizing flows on manifolds. Existing methods for generative modeling on manifolds either require expensive simulation, are inherently unable to scale to high dimensions, or use approximations for limiting quantities that result in biased training objectives. Riemannian Flow Matching bypasses these limitations and offers several advantages over previous approaches: it is simulation-free on simple geometries, does not require divergence computation, and computes its target vector field in closed-form. The key ingredient behind RFM is the construction of a relatively simple premetric for defining target vector fields, which encompasses the existing Euclidean case. To extend to general geometries, we rely on the use of spectral decompositions to efficiently compute premetrics on the fly. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on many real-world non-Euclidean datasets, and we demonstrate tractable training on general geometries, including triangular meshes with highly non-trivial curvature and boundaries.
Rigid Body Flows for Sampling Molecular Crystal Structures
Normalizing flows (NF) are a class of powerful generative models that have gained popularity in recent years due to their ability to model complex distributions with high flexibility and expressiveness. In this work, we introduce a new type of normalizing flow that is tailored for modeling positions and orientations of multiple objects in three-dimensional space, such as molecules in a crystal. Our approach is based on two key ideas: first, we define smooth and expressive flows on the group of unit quaternions, which allows us to capture the continuous rotational motion of rigid bodies; second, we use the double cover property of unit quaternions to define a proper density on the rotation group. This ensures that our model can be trained using standard likelihood-based methods or variational inference with respect to a thermodynamic target density. We evaluate the method by training Boltzmann generators for two molecular examples, namely the multi-modal density of a tetrahedral system in an external field and the ice XI phase in the TIP4P water model. Our flows can be combined with flows operating on the internal degrees of freedom of molecules and constitute an important step towards the modeling of distributions of many interacting molecules.
AirPhyNet: Harnessing Physics-Guided Neural Networks for Air Quality Prediction
Air quality prediction and modelling plays a pivotal role in public health and environment management, for individuals and authorities to make informed decisions. Although traditional data-driven models have shown promise in this domain, their long-term prediction accuracy can be limited, especially in scenarios with sparse or incomplete data and they often rely on black-box deep learning structures that lack solid physical foundation leading to reduced transparency and interpretability in predictions. To address these limitations, this paper presents a novel approach named Physics guided Neural Network for Air Quality Prediction (AirPhyNet). Specifically, we leverage two well-established physics principles of air particle movement (diffusion and advection) by representing them as differential equation networks. Then, we utilize a graph structure to integrate physics knowledge into a neural network architecture and exploit latent representations to capture spatio-temporal relationships within the air quality data. Experiments on two real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that AirPhyNet outperforms state-of-the-art models for different testing scenarios including different lead time (24h, 48h, 72h), sparse data and sudden change prediction, achieving reduction in prediction errors up to 10%. Moreover, a case study further validates that our model captures underlying physical processes of particle movement and generates accurate predictions with real physical meaning.
Physics-Informed Diffusion Models
Generative models such as denoising diffusion models are quickly advancing their ability to approximate highly complex data distributions. They are also increasingly leveraged in scientific machine learning, where samples from the implied data distribution are expected to adhere to specific governing equations. We present a framework that unifies generative modeling and partial differential equation fulfillment by introducing a first-principle-based loss term that enforces generated samples to fulfill the underlying physical constraints. Our approach reduces the residual error by up to two orders of magnitude compared to previous work in a fluid flow case study and outperforms task-specific frameworks in relevant metrics for structural topology optimization. We also present numerical evidence that our extended training objective acts as a natural regularization mechanism against overfitting. Our framework is simple to implement and versatile in its applicability for imposing equality and inequality constraints as well as auxiliary optimization objectives.
Finite Difference Neural Networks: Fast Prediction of Partial Differential Equations
Discovering the underlying behavior of complex systems is an important topic in many science and engineering disciplines. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network framework, finite difference neural networks (FDNet), to learn partial differential equations from data. Specifically, our proposed finite difference inspired network is designed to learn the underlying governing partial differential equations from trajectory data, and to iteratively estimate the future dynamical behavior using only a few trainable parameters. We illustrate the performance (predictive power) of our framework on the heat equation, with and without noise and/or forcing, and compare our results to the Forward Euler method. Moreover, we show the advantages of using a Hessian-Free Trust Region method to train the network.
Self-Supervised Learning with Lie Symmetries for Partial Differential Equations
Machine learning for differential equations paves the way for computationally efficient alternatives to numerical solvers, with potentially broad impacts in science and engineering. Though current algorithms typically require simulated training data tailored to a given setting, one may instead wish to learn useful information from heterogeneous sources, or from real dynamical systems observations that are messy or incomplete. In this work, we learn general-purpose representations of PDEs from heterogeneous data by implementing joint embedding methods for self-supervised learning (SSL), a framework for unsupervised representation learning that has had notable success in computer vision. Our representation outperforms baseline approaches to invariant tasks, such as regressing the coefficients of a PDE, while also improving the time-stepping performance of neural solvers. We hope that our proposed methodology will prove useful in the eventual development of general-purpose foundation models for PDEs.
High Throughput Training of Deep Surrogates from Large Ensemble Runs
Recent years have seen a surge in deep learning approaches to accelerate numerical solvers, which provide faithful but computationally intensive simulations of the physical world. These deep surrogates are generally trained in a supervised manner from limited amounts of data slowly generated by the same solver they intend to accelerate. We propose an open-source framework that enables the online training of these models from a large ensemble run of simulations. It leverages multiple levels of parallelism to generate rich datasets. The framework avoids I/O bottlenecks and storage issues by directly streaming the generated data. A training reservoir mitigates the inherent bias of streaming while maximizing GPU throughput. Experiment on training a fully connected network as a surrogate for the heat equation shows the proposed approach enables training on 8TB of data in 2 hours with an accuracy improved by 47% and a batch throughput multiplied by 13 compared to a traditional offline procedure.
Performance analysis of Volna-OP2 -- massively parallel code for tsunami modelling
The software package Volna-OP2 is a robust and efficient code capable of simulating the complete life cycle of a tsunami whilst harnessing the latest High Performance Computing (HPC) architectures. In this paper, a comprehensive error analysis and scalability study of the GPU version of the code is presented. A novel decomposition of the numerical errors into the dispersion and dissipation components is explored. Most tsunami codes exhibit amplitude smearing and/or phase lagging/leading, so the decomposition shown here is a new approach and novel tool for explaining these occurrences. It is the first time that the errors of a tsunami code have been assessed in this manner. To date, Volna-OP2 has been widely used by the tsunami modelling community. In particular its computational efficiency has allowed various sensitivity analyses and uncertainty quantification studies. Due to the number of simulations required, there is always a trade-off between accuracy and runtime when carrying out these statistical studies. The analysis presented in this paper will guide the user towards an acceptable level of accuracy within a given runtime.
Geometric Clifford Algebra Networks
We propose Geometric Clifford Algebra Networks (GCANs) for modeling dynamical systems. GCANs are based on symmetry group transformations using geometric (Clifford) algebras. We first review the quintessence of modern (plane-based) geometric algebra, which builds on isometries encoded as elements of the Pin(p,q,r) group. We then propose the concept of group action layers, which linearly combine object transformations using pre-specified group actions. Together with a new activation and normalization scheme, these layers serve as adjustable geometric templates that can be refined via gradient descent. Theoretical advantages are strongly reflected in the modeling of three-dimensional rigid body transformations as well as large-scale fluid dynamics simulations, showing significantly improved performance over traditional methods.
Community Research Earth Digital Intelligence Twin (CREDIT)
Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) for numerical weather prediction (NWP) have significantly transformed atmospheric modeling. AI NWP models outperform traditional physics-based systems, such as the Integrated Forecast System (IFS), across several global metrics while requiring fewer computational resources. However, existing AI NWP models face limitations related to training datasets and timestep choices, often resulting in artifacts that reduce model performance. To address these challenges, we introduce the Community Research Earth Digital Intelligence Twin (CREDIT) framework, developed at NSF NCAR. CREDIT provides a flexible, scalable, and user-friendly platform for training and deploying AI-based atmospheric models on high-performance computing systems. It offers an end-to-end pipeline for data preprocessing, model training, and evaluation, democratizing access to advanced AI NWP capabilities. We demonstrate CREDIT's potential through WXFormer, a novel deterministic vision transformer designed to predict atmospheric states autoregressively, addressing common AI NWP issues like compounding error growth with techniques such as spectral normalization, padding, and multi-step training. Additionally, to illustrate CREDIT's flexibility and state-of-the-art model comparisons, we train the FUXI architecture within this framework. Our findings show that both FUXI and WXFormer, trained on six-hourly ERA5 hybrid sigma-pressure levels, generally outperform IFS HRES in 10-day forecasts, offering potential improvements in efficiency and forecast accuracy. CREDIT's modular design enables researchers to explore various models, datasets, and training configurations, fostering innovation within the scientific community.
SineNet: Learning Temporal Dynamics in Time-Dependent Partial Differential Equations
We consider using deep neural networks to solve time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs), where multi-scale processing is crucial for modeling complex, time-evolving dynamics. While the U-Net architecture with skip connections is commonly used by prior studies to enable multi-scale processing, our analysis shows that the need for features to evolve across layers results in temporally misaligned features in skip connections, which limits the model's performance. To address this limitation, we propose SineNet, consisting of multiple sequentially connected U-shaped network blocks, referred to as waves. In SineNet, high-resolution features are evolved progressively through multiple stages, thereby reducing the amount of misalignment within each stage. We furthermore analyze the role of skip connections in enabling both parallel and sequential processing of multi-scale information. Our method is rigorously tested on multiple PDE datasets, including the Navier-Stokes equations and shallow water equations, showcasing the advantages of our proposed approach over conventional U-Nets with a comparable parameter budget. We further demonstrate that increasing the number of waves in SineNet while maintaining the same number of parameters leads to a monotonically improved performance. The results highlight the effectiveness of SineNet and the potential of our approach in advancing the state-of-the-art in neural PDE solver design. Our code is available as part of AIRS (https://github.com/divelab/AIRS).
Uncertainty quantification for industrial design using dictionaries of reduced order models
We consider the dictionary-based ROM-net (Reduced Order Model) framework [T. Daniel, F. Casenave, N. Akkari, D. Ryckelynck, Model order reduction assisted by deep neural networks (ROM-net), Advanced modeling and Simulation in Engineering Sciences 7 (16), 2020] and summarize the underlying methodologies and their recent improvements. The main contribution of this work is the application of the complete workflow to a real-life industrial model of an elastoviscoplastic high-pressure turbine blade subjected to thermal, centrifugal and pressure loadings, for the quantification of the uncertainty on dual quantities (such as the accumulated plastic strain and the stress tensor), generated by the uncertainty on the temperature loading field. The dictionary-based ROM-net computes predictions of dual quantities of interest for 1008 Monte Carlo draws of the temperature loading field in 2 hours and 48 minutes, which corresponds to a speedup greater than 600 with respect to a reference parallel solver using domain decomposition, with a relative error in the order of 2%. Another contribution of this work consists in the derivation of a meta-model to reconstruct the dual quantities of interest over the complete mesh from their values on the reduced integration points.
Turbulence modulation in liquid-liquid two-phase Taylor-Couette turbulence
We investigate the coupling effects of the two-phase interface, viscosity ratio, and density ratio of the dispersed phase to the continuous phase on the flow statistics in two-phase Taylor-Couette turbulence at a system Reynolds number of 6000 and a system Weber number of 10 using interface-resolved three-dimensional direct numerical simulations with the volume-of-fluid method. Our study focuses on four different scenarios: neutral droplets, low-viscosity droplets, light droplets, and low-viscosity light droplets. We find that neutral droplets and low-viscosity droplets primarily contribute to drag enhancement through the two-phase interface, while light droplets reduce the system's drag by explicitly reducing Reynolds stress due to the density dependence of Reynolds stress. Additionally, low-viscosity light droplets contribute to greater drag reduction by further reducing momentum transport near the inner cylinder and implicitly reducing Reynolds stress. While interfacial tension enhances turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) transport, drag enhancement is not strongly correlated with TKE transport for both neutral droplets and low-viscosity droplets. Light droplets primarily reduce the production term by diminishing Reynolds stress, whereas the density contrast between the phases boosts TKE transport near the inner wall. Therefore, the reduction in the dissipation rate is predominantly attributed to decreased turbulence production, causing drag reduction. For low-viscosity light droplets, the production term diminishes further, primarily due to their greater reduction in Reynolds stress, while reduced viscosity weakens the density difference's contribution to TKE transport near the inner cylinder, resulting in a more pronounced reduction in the dissipation rate and consequently stronger drag reduction. Our findings provide new insights into the turbulence modulation in two-phase flow.
Boundary Element and Finite Element Coupling for Aeroacoustics Simulations
We consider the scattering of acoustic perturbations in a presence of a flow. We suppose that the space can be split into a zone where the flow is uniform and a zone where the flow is potential. In the first zone, we apply a Prandtl-Glauert transformation to recover the Helmholtz equation. The well-known setting of boundary element method for the Helmholtz equation is available. In the second zone, the flow quantities are space dependent, we have to consider a local resolution, namely the finite element method. Herein, we carry out the coupling of these two methods and present various applications and validation test cases. The source term is given through the decomposition of an incident acoustic field on a section of the computational domain's boundary.
Normalizing flows as an enhanced sampling method for atomistic supercooled liquids
Normalizing flows can transform a simple prior probability distribution into a more complex target distribution. Here, we evaluate the ability and efficiency of generative machine learning methods to sample the Boltzmann distribution of an atomistic model for glass-forming liquids. This is a notoriously difficult task, as it amounts to ergodically exploring the complex free energy landscape of a disordered and frustrated many-body system. We optimize a normalizing flow model to successfully transform high-temperature configurations of a dense liquid into low-temperature ones, near the glass transition. We perform a detailed comparative analysis with established enhanced sampling techniques developed in the physics literature to assess and rank the performance of normalizing flows against state-of-the-art algorithms. We demonstrate that machine learning methods are very promising, showing a large speedup over conventional molecular dynamics. Normalizing flows show performances comparable to parallel tempering and population annealing, while still falling far behind the swap Monte Carlo algorithm. Our study highlights the potential of generative machine learning models in scientific computing for complex systems, but also points to some of its current limitations and the need for further improvement.
HMC with Normalizing Flows
We propose using Normalizing Flows as a trainable kernel within the molecular dynamics update of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC). By learning (invertible) transformations that simplify our dynamics, we can outperform traditional methods at generating independent configurations. We show that, using a carefully constructed network architecture, our approach can be easily scaled to large lattice volumes with minimal retraining effort. The source code for our implementation is publicly available online at https://github.com/nftqcd/fthmc.
Unsteady and inertial dynamics of an active particle in a fluid
It is well known that the reversibility of Stokes flow makes it difficult for small microorganisms to swim. Inertial effects break this reversibility, allowing new mechanisms of propulsion and feeding. Therefore it is important to understand the effects of unsteady and fluid inertia on the dynamics of microorganisms in flow. In this work, we show how to translate known inertial effects for non-motile organisms to motile ones, from passive to active particles. The method relies on a principle used earlier by Legendre and Magnaudet (1997) to deduce inertial corrections to the lift force on a bubble from the inertial drag on a solid sphere, using the fact that small inertial effects are determined by the far field of the disturbance flow. The method allows for example to compute the inertial effect of unsteady fluid accelerations on motile organisms, and the inertial forces such organisms experience in steady shear flow. We explain why the method fails to describe the effect of convective fluid inertia.
MMGP: a Mesh Morphing Gaussian Process-based machine learning method for regression of physical problems under non-parameterized geometrical variability
When learning simulations for modeling physical phenomena in industrial designs, geometrical variabilities are of prime interest. While classical regression techniques prove effective for parameterized geometries, practical scenarios often involve the absence of shape parametrization during the inference stage, leaving us with only mesh discretizations as available data. Learning simulations from such mesh-based representations poses significant challenges, with recent advances relying heavily on deep graph neural networks to overcome the limitations of conventional machine learning approaches. Despite their promising results, graph neural networks exhibit certain drawbacks, including their dependency on extensive datasets and limitations in providing built-in predictive uncertainties or handling large meshes. In this work, we propose a machine learning method that do not rely on graph neural networks. Complex geometrical shapes and variations with fixed topology are dealt with using well-known mesh morphing onto a common support, combined with classical dimensionality reduction techniques and Gaussian processes. The proposed methodology can easily deal with large meshes without the need for explicit shape parameterization and provides crucial predictive uncertainties, which are essential for informed decision-making. In the considered numerical experiments, the proposed method is competitive with respect to existing graph neural networks, regarding training efficiency and accuracy of the predictions.
Radiation-magnetohydrodynamics with MPI-AMRVAC using flux-limited diffusion
Context. Radiation plays a significant role in solar and astrophysical environments as it may constitute a sizeable fraction of the energy density, momentum flux, and the total pressure. Modelling the dynamic interaction between radiation and magnetized plasmas in such environments is an intricate and computationally costly task. Aims. The goal of this work is to demonstrate the capabilities of the open-source parallel, block-adaptive computational framework MPI-AMRVAC, in solving equations of radiation-magnetohydrodynamics (RMHD), and to present benchmark test cases relevant for radiation-dominated magnetized plasmas. Methods. The existing magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) and flux-limited diffusion (FLD) radiative-hydrodynamics physics modules are combined to solve the equations of radiation-magnetohydrodynamics (RMHD) on block-adaptive finite volume Cartesian meshes in any dimensionality. Results. We introduce and validate several benchmark test cases such as steady radiative MHD shocks, radiation-damped linear MHD waves, radiation-modified Riemann problems and a multi-dimensional radiative magnetoconvection case. We recall the basic governing Rankine-Hugoniot relations for shocks and the dispersion relation for linear MHD waves in the presence of optically thick radiation fields where the diffusion limit is reached. The RMHD system allows for 8 linear wave types, where the classical 7-wave MHD picture (entropy and three wave pairs for slow, Alfven and fast) is augmented with a radiative diffusion mode. Conclusions. The MPI-AMRVAC code now has the capability to perform multidimensional RMHD simulations with mesh adaptation making it well-suited for larger scientific applications to study magnetized matter-radiation interactions in solar and stellar interiors and atmospheres.
Solving High-Dimensional PDEs with Latent Spectral Models
Deep models have achieved impressive progress in solving partial differential equations (PDEs). A burgeoning paradigm is learning neural operators to approximate the input-output mappings of PDEs. While previous deep models have explored the multiscale architectures and various operator designs, they are limited to learning the operators as a whole in the coordinate space. In real physical science problems, PDEs are complex coupled equations with numerical solvers relying on discretization into high-dimensional coordinate space, which cannot be precisely approximated by a single operator nor efficiently learned due to the curse of dimensionality. We present Latent Spectral Models (LSM) toward an efficient and precise solver for high-dimensional PDEs. Going beyond the coordinate space, LSM enables an attention-based hierarchical projection network to reduce the high-dimensional data into a compact latent space in linear time. Inspired by classical spectral methods in numerical analysis, we design a neural spectral block to solve PDEs in the latent space that approximates complex input-output mappings via learning multiple basis operators, enjoying nice theoretical guarantees for convergence and approximation. Experimentally, LSM achieves consistent state-of-the-art and yields a relative gain of 11.5% averaged on seven benchmarks covering both solid and fluid physics. Code is available at https://github.com/thuml/Latent-Spectral-Models.
Machine Learning Parameterization of the Multi-scale Kain-Fritsch (MSKF) Convection Scheme
Warm-sector heavy rainfall often occurs along the coast of South China, and it is usually localized and long-lasting, making it challenging to predict. High-resolution numerical weather prediction (NWP) models are increasingly used to better resolve topographic features and forecast such high-impact weather events. However, when the grid spacing becomes comparable to the length scales of convection, known as the gray zone, the turbulent eddies in the atmospheric boundary layer are only partially resolved and parameterized to some extent. Whether using a convection parameterization (CP) scheme in the gray zone remains controversial. Scale-aware CP schemes are developed to enhance the representation of convective transport within the gray zone. The multi-scale Kain-Fritsch (MSKF) scheme includes modifications that allow for its effective implementation at a grid resolution as high as 2 km. In recent years, there has been an increasing application of machine learning (ML) models to various domains of atmospheric sciences, including the replacement of physical parameterizations with ML models. This work proposes a multi-output bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) model as a replace the scale-aware MSKF CP scheme. The Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model is used to generate training and testing data over South China at a horizontal resolution of 5 km. Furthermore, the WRF model is coupled with the ML based CP scheme and compared with WRF simulations with original MSKF scheme. The results demonstrate that the Bi-LSTM model can achieve high accuracy, indicating the potential use of ML models to substitute the MSKF scheme in the gray zone.
Physics-Informed Learning of Characteristic Trajectories for Smoke Reconstruction
We delve into the physics-informed neural reconstruction of smoke and obstacles through sparse-view RGB videos, tackling challenges arising from limited observation of complex dynamics. Existing physics-informed neural networks often emphasize short-term physics constraints, leaving the proper preservation of long-term conservation less explored. We introduce Neural Characteristic Trajectory Fields, a novel representation utilizing Eulerian neural fields to implicitly model Lagrangian fluid trajectories. This topology-free, auto-differentiable representation facilitates efficient flow map calculations between arbitrary frames as well as efficient velocity extraction via auto-differentiation. Consequently, it enables end-to-end supervision covering long-term conservation and short-term physics priors. Building on the representation, we propose physics-informed trajectory learning and integration into NeRF-based scene reconstruction. We enable advanced obstacle handling through self-supervised scene decomposition and seamless integrated boundary constraints. Our results showcase the ability to overcome challenges like occlusion uncertainty, density-color ambiguity, and static-dynamic entanglements. Code and sample tests are at https://github.com/19reborn/PICT_smoke.
ClimaX: A foundation model for weather and climate
Most state-of-the-art approaches for weather and climate modeling are based on physics-informed numerical models of the atmosphere. These approaches aim to model the non-linear dynamics and complex interactions between multiple variables, which are challenging to approximate. Additionally, many such numerical models are computationally intensive, especially when modeling the atmospheric phenomenon at a fine-grained spatial and temporal resolution. Recent data-driven approaches based on machine learning instead aim to directly solve a downstream forecasting or projection task by learning a data-driven functional mapping using deep neural networks. However, these networks are trained using curated and homogeneous climate datasets for specific spatiotemporal tasks, and thus lack the generality of numerical models. We develop and demonstrate ClimaX, a flexible and generalizable deep learning model for weather and climate science that can be trained using heterogeneous datasets spanning different variables, spatio-temporal coverage, and physical groundings. ClimaX extends the Transformer architecture with novel encoding and aggregation blocks that allow effective use of available compute while maintaining general utility. ClimaX is pre-trained with a self-supervised learning objective on climate datasets derived from CMIP6. The pre-trained ClimaX can then be fine-tuned to address a breadth of climate and weather tasks, including those that involve atmospheric variables and spatio-temporal scales unseen during pretraining. Compared to existing data-driven baselines, we show that this generality in ClimaX results in superior performance on benchmarks for weather forecasting and climate projections, even when pretrained at lower resolutions and compute budgets.
Lagrangian PINNs: A causality-conforming solution to failure modes of physics-informed neural networks
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) leverage neural-networks to find the solutions of partial differential equation (PDE)-constrained optimization problems with initial conditions and boundary conditions as soft constraints. These soft constraints are often considered to be the sources of the complexity in the training phase of PINNs. Here, we demonstrate that the challenge of training (i) persists even when the boundary conditions are strictly enforced, and (ii) is closely related to the Kolmogorov n-width associated with problems demonstrating transport, convection, traveling waves, or moving fronts. Given this realization, we describe the mechanism underlying the training schemes such as those used in eXtended PINNs (XPINN), curriculum regularization, and sequence-to-sequence learning. For an important category of PDEs, i.e., governed by non-linear convection-diffusion equation, we propose reformulating PINNs on a Lagrangian frame of reference, i.e., LPINNs, as a PDE-informed solution. A parallel architecture with two branches is proposed. One branch solves for the state variables on the characteristics, and the second branch solves for the low-dimensional characteristics curves. The proposed architecture conforms to the causality innate to the convection, and leverages the direction of travel of the information in the domain. Finally, we demonstrate that the loss landscapes of LPINNs are less sensitive to the so-called "complexity" of the problems, compared to those in the traditional PINNs in the Eulerian framework.
Better Neural PDE Solvers Through Data-Free Mesh Movers
Recently, neural networks have been extensively employed to solve partial differential equations (PDEs) in physical system modeling. While major studies focus on learning system evolution on predefined static mesh discretizations, some methods utilize reinforcement learning or supervised learning techniques to create adaptive and dynamic meshes, due to the dynamic nature of these systems. However, these approaches face two primary challenges: (1) the need for expensive optimal mesh data, and (2) the change of the solution space's degree of freedom and topology during mesh refinement. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a neural PDE solver with a neural mesh adapter. To begin with, we introduce a novel data-free neural mesh adaptor, called Data-free Mesh Mover (DMM), with two main innovations. Firstly, it is an operator that maps the solution to adaptive meshes and is trained using the Monge-Amp\`ere equation without optimal mesh data. Secondly, it dynamically changes the mesh by moving existing nodes rather than adding or deleting nodes and edges. Theoretical analysis shows that meshes generated by DMM have the lowest interpolation error bound. Based on DMM, to efficiently and accurately model dynamic systems, we develop a moving mesh based neural PDE solver (MM-PDE) that embeds the moving mesh with a two-branch architecture and a learnable interpolation framework to preserve information within the data. Empirical experiments demonstrate that our method generates suitable meshes and considerably enhances accuracy when modeling widely considered PDE systems. The code can be found at: https://github.com/Peiyannn/MM-PDE.git.
Learning Physical Models that Can Respect Conservation Laws
Recent work in scientific machine learning (SciML) has focused on incorporating partial differential equation (PDE) information into the learning process. Much of this work has focused on relatively ``easy'' PDE operators (e.g., elliptic and parabolic), with less emphasis on relatively ``hard'' PDE operators (e.g., hyperbolic). Within numerical PDEs, the latter problem class requires control of a type of volume element or conservation constraint, which is known to be challenging. Delivering on the promise of SciML requires seamlessly incorporating both types of problems into the learning process. To address this issue, we propose ProbConserv, a framework for incorporating conservation constraints into a generic SciML architecture. To do so, ProbConserv combines the integral form of a conservation law with a Bayesian update. We provide a detailed analysis of ProbConserv on learning with the Generalized Porous Medium Equation (GPME), a widely-applicable parameterized family of PDEs that illustrates the qualitative properties of both easier and harder PDEs. ProbConserv is effective for easy GPME variants, performing well with state-of-the-art competitors; and for harder GPME variants it outperforms other approaches that do not guarantee volume conservation. ProbConserv seamlessly enforces physical conservation constraints, maintains probabilistic uncertainty quantification (UQ), and deals well with shocks and heteroscedasticities. In each case, it achieves superior predictive performance on downstream tasks.
Reflected Flow Matching
Continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) learn an ordinary differential equation to transform prior samples into data. Flow matching (FM) has recently emerged as a simulation-free approach for training CNFs by regressing a velocity model towards the conditional velocity field. However, on constrained domains, the learned velocity model may lead to undesirable flows that result in highly unnatural samples, e.g., oversaturated images, due to both flow matching error and simulation error. To address this, we add a boundary constraint term to CNFs, which leads to reflected CNFs that keep trajectories within the constrained domains. We propose reflected flow matching (RFM) to train the velocity model in reflected CNFs by matching the conditional velocity fields in a simulation-free manner, similar to the vanilla FM. Moreover, the analytical form of conditional velocity fields in RFM avoids potentially biased approximations, making it superior to existing score-based generative models on constrained domains. We demonstrate that RFM achieves comparable or better results on standard image benchmarks and produces high-quality class-conditioned samples under high guidance weight.
Coherent Structures Governing Transport at Turbulent Interfaces
In an experiment on a turbulent jet, we detect interfacial turbulent layers in a frame that moves, on average, along with the \tnti. This significantly prolongs the observation time of scalar and velocity structures and enables the measurement of two types of Lagrangian coherent structures. One structure, the finite-time Lyapunov field (FTLE), quantifies advective transport barriers of fluid parcels while the other structure highlights barriers of diffusive momentum transport. These two complementary structures depend on large-scale and small-scale motion and are therefore associated with the growth of the turbulent region through engulfment or nibbling, respectively. We detect the \tnti\ from cluster analysis, where we divide the measured scalar field into four clusters. Not only the \tnti\ can be found this way, but also the next, internal, turbulent-turbulent interface. Conditional averages show that these interfaces are correlated with barriers of advective and diffusive transport when the Lagrangian integration time is smaller than the integral time scale. Diffusive structures decorrelate faster since they have a smaller timescale. Conditional averages of these structures at internal turbulent-turbulent interfaces show the same pattern with a more pronounced jump at the interface indicative of a shear layer. This is quite an unexpected outcome, as the internal interface is now defined not by the presence or absence of vorticity, but by conditional vorticity corresponding to two uniform concentration zones. The long-time diffusive momentum flux along Lagrangian paths represents the growth of the turbulent flow into the irrotational domain, a direct demonstration of nibbling. The diffusive flux parallel to the \tnti\ appears to be concentrated in a diffusive superlayer whose width is comparable with the Taylor microscale, which is relatively invariant in time.
An elasticity-based mesh morphing technique with application to reduced-order modeling
The aim of this article is to introduce a new methodology for constructing morphings between shapes that have identical topology. This morphing is obtained by deforming a reference shape, through the resolution of a sequence of linear elasticity equations, onto the target shape. In particular, our approach does not assume any knowledge of a boundary parametrization. Furthermore, we demonstrate how constraints can be imposed on specific points, lines and surfaces in the reference domain to ensure alignment with their counterparts in the target domain after morphing. Additionally, we show how the proposed methodology can be integrated in an offline and online paradigm, which is useful in reduced-order modeling scenarii involving variable shapes. This framework facilitates the efficient computation of the morphings in various geometric configurations, thus improving the versatility and applicability of the approach. The methodology is illustrated on the regression problem of the drag and lift coefficients of airfoils of non-parameterized variable shapes.
Large Language and Text-to-3D Models for Engineering Design Optimization
The current advances in generative AI for learning large neural network models with the capability to produce essays, images, music and even 3D assets from text prompts create opportunities for a manifold of disciplines. In the present paper, we study the potential of deep text-to-3D models in the engineering domain, with focus on the chances and challenges when integrating and interacting with 3D assets in computational simulation-based design optimization. In contrast to traditional design optimization of 3D geometries that often searches for the optimum designs using numerical representations, such as B-Spline surface or deformation parameters in vehicle aerodynamic optimization, natural language challenges the optimization framework by requiring a different interpretation of variation operators while at the same time may ease and motivate the human user interaction. Here, we propose and realize a fully automated evolutionary design optimization framework using Shap-E, a recently published text-to-3D asset network by OpenAI, in the context of aerodynamic vehicle optimization. For representing text prompts in the evolutionary optimization, we evaluate (a) a bag-of-words approach based on prompt templates and Wordnet samples, and (b) a tokenisation approach based on prompt templates and the byte pair encoding method from GPT4. Our main findings from the optimizations indicate that, first, it is important to ensure that the designs generated from prompts are within the object class of application, i.e. diverse and novel designs need to be realistic, and, second, that more research is required to develop methods where the strength of text prompt variations and the resulting variations of the 3D designs share causal relations to some degree to improve the optimization.
Minimizing Trajectory Curvature of ODE-based Generative Models
Recent ODE/SDE-based generative models, such as diffusion models, rectified flows, and flow matching, define a generative process as a time reversal of a fixed forward process. Even though these models show impressive performance on large-scale datasets, numerical simulation requires multiple evaluations of a neural network, leading to a slow sampling speed. We attribute the reason to the high curvature of the learned generative trajectories, as it is directly related to the truncation error of a numerical solver. Based on the relationship between the forward process and the curvature, here we present an efficient method of training the forward process to minimize the curvature of generative trajectories without any ODE/SDE simulation. Experiments show that our method achieves a lower curvature than previous models and, therefore, decreased sampling costs while maintaining competitive performance. Code is available at https://github.com/sangyun884/fast-ode.
Critical scaling law for the deposition efficiency of inertia-driven particle collisions with a cylinder in high Reynolds number air flow
The Earth's atmosphere is an aerosol, it contains suspended particles. When air flows over an obstacle such as an aircraft wing or tree branch, these particles may not follow the same paths as the air flowing around the obstacle. Instead the particles in the air may deviate from the path of the air and so collide with the surface of the obstacle. It is known that particle inertia can drive this deposition, and that there is a critical value of this inertia, below which no point particles deposit. Particle inertia is measured by the Stokes number, St. We show that near the critical value of the Stokes number, St_c, the amount of deposition has the unusual scaling law of exp(-1/(St-St_c)^{1/2}). The scaling is controlled by the stagnation point of the flow. This scaling is determined by the time for the particle to reach the surface of the cylinder varying as 1/(St-St_c)^{1/2}, together with the distance away from the stagnation point (perpendicular to the flow direction) increasing exponentially with time. The scaling law applies to inviscid flow, a model for flow at high Reynolds numbers. The unusual scaling means that the amount of particles deposited increases only very slowly above the critical Stokes number. This has consequences for applications ranging from rime formation and fog harvesting to pollination.
Multi-Fidelity Covariance Estimation in the Log-Euclidean Geometry
We introduce a multi-fidelity estimator of covariance matrices that employs the log-Euclidean geometry of the symmetric positive-definite manifold. The estimator fuses samples from a hierarchy of data sources of differing fidelities and costs for variance reduction while guaranteeing definiteness, in contrast with previous approaches. The new estimator makes covariance estimation tractable in applications where simulation or data collection is expensive; to that end, we develop an optimal sample allocation scheme that minimizes the mean-squared error of the estimator given a fixed budget. Guaranteed definiteness is crucial to metric learning, data assimilation, and other downstream tasks. Evaluations of our approach using data from physical applications (heat conduction, fluid dynamics) demonstrate more accurate metric learning and speedups of more than one order of magnitude compared to benchmarks.
An error indicator-based adaptive reduced order model for nonlinear structural mechanics -- application to high-pressure turbine blades
The industrial application motivating this work is the fatigue computation of aircraft engines' high-pressure turbine blades. The material model involves nonlinear elastoviscoplastic behavior laws, for which the parameters depend on the temperature. For this application, the temperature loading is not accurately known and can reach values relatively close to the creep temperature: important nonlinear effects occur and the solution strongly depends on the used thermal loading. We consider a nonlinear reduced order model able to compute, in the exploitation phase, the behavior of the blade for a new temperature field loading. The sensitivity of the solution to the temperature makes {the classical unenriched proper orthogonal decomposition method} fail. In this work, we propose a new error indicator, quantifying the error made by the reduced order model in computational complexity independent of the size of the high-fidelity reference model. In our framework, when the {error indicator} becomes larger than a given tolerance, the reduced order model is updated using one time step solution of the high-fidelity reference model. The approach is illustrated on a series of academic test cases and applied on a setting of industrial complexity involving 5 million degrees of freedom, where the whole procedure is computed in parallel with distributed memory.
DYffusion: A Dynamics-informed Diffusion Model for Spatiotemporal Forecasting
While diffusion models can successfully generate data and make predictions, they are predominantly designed for static images. We propose an approach for efficiently training diffusion models for probabilistic spatiotemporal forecasting, where generating stable and accurate rollout forecasts remains challenging, Our method, DYffusion, leverages the temporal dynamics in the data, directly coupling it with the diffusion steps in the model. We train a stochastic, time-conditioned interpolator and a forecaster network that mimic the forward and reverse processes of standard diffusion models, respectively. DYffusion naturally facilitates multi-step and long-range forecasting, allowing for highly flexible, continuous-time sampling trajectories and the ability to trade-off performance with accelerated sampling at inference time. In addition, the dynamics-informed diffusion process in DYffusion imposes a strong inductive bias and significantly improves computational efficiency compared to traditional Gaussian noise-based diffusion models. Our approach performs competitively on probabilistic forecasting of complex dynamics in sea surface temperatures, Navier-Stokes flows, and spring mesh systems.
DreamPropeller: Supercharge Text-to-3D Generation with Parallel Sampling
Recent methods such as Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) and Variational Score Distillation (VSD) using 2D diffusion models for text-to-3D generation have demonstrated impressive generation quality. However, the long generation time of such algorithms significantly degrades the user experience. To tackle this problem, we propose DreamPropeller, a drop-in acceleration algorithm that can be wrapped around any existing text-to-3D generation pipeline based on score distillation. Our framework generalizes Picard iterations, a classical algorithm for parallel sampling an ODE path, and can account for non-ODE paths such as momentum-based gradient updates and changes in dimensions during the optimization process as in many cases of 3D generation. We show that our algorithm trades parallel compute for wallclock time and empirically achieves up to 4.7x speedup with a negligible drop in generation quality for all tested frameworks.
Neural Operator: Learning Maps Between Function Spaces
The classical development of neural networks has primarily focused on learning mappings between finite dimensional Euclidean spaces or finite sets. We propose a generalization of neural networks to learn operators, termed neural operators, that map between infinite dimensional function spaces. We formulate the neural operator as a composition of linear integral operators and nonlinear activation functions. We prove a universal approximation theorem for our proposed neural operator, showing that it can approximate any given nonlinear continuous operator. The proposed neural operators are also discretization-invariant, i.e., they share the same model parameters among different discretization of the underlying function spaces. Furthermore, we introduce four classes of efficient parameterization, viz., graph neural operators, multi-pole graph neural operators, low-rank neural operators, and Fourier neural operators. An important application for neural operators is learning surrogate maps for the solution operators of partial differential equations (PDEs). We consider standard PDEs such as the Burgers, Darcy subsurface flow, and the Navier-Stokes equations, and show that the proposed neural operators have superior performance compared to existing machine learning based methodologies, while being several orders of magnitude faster than conventional PDE solvers.
Constant Acceleration Flow
Rectified flow and reflow procedures have significantly advanced fast generation by progressively straightening ordinary differential equation (ODE) flows. They operate under the assumption that image and noise pairs, known as couplings, can be approximated by straight trajectories with constant velocity. However, we observe that modeling with constant velocity and using reflow procedures have limitations in accurately learning straight trajectories between pairs, resulting in suboptimal performance in few-step generation. To address these limitations, we introduce Constant Acceleration Flow (CAF), a novel framework based on a simple constant acceleration equation. CAF introduces acceleration as an additional learnable variable, allowing for more expressive and accurate estimation of the ODE flow. Moreover, we propose two techniques to further improve estimation accuracy: initial velocity conditioning for the acceleration model and a reflow process for the initial velocity. Our comprehensive studies on toy datasets, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet 64x64 demonstrate that CAF outperforms state-of-the-art baselines for one-step generation. We also show that CAF dramatically improves few-step coupling preservation and inversion over Rectified flow. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/CAF{https://github.com/mlvlab/CAF}.
Simulating Fluids in Real-World Still Images
In this work, we tackle the problem of real-world fluid animation from a still image. The key of our system is a surface-based layered representation deriving from video decomposition, where the scene is decoupled into a surface fluid layer and an impervious background layer with corresponding transparencies to characterize the composition of the two layers. The animated video can be produced by warping only the surface fluid layer according to the estimation of fluid motions and recombining it with the background. In addition, we introduce surface-only fluid simulation, a 2.5D fluid calculation version, as a replacement for motion estimation. Specifically, we leverage the triangular mesh based on a monocular depth estimator to represent the fluid surface layer and simulate the motion in the physics-based framework with the inspiration of the classic theory of the hybrid Lagrangian-Eulerian method, along with a learnable network so as to adapt to complex real-world image textures. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system through comparison with existing methods in both standard objective metrics and subjective ranking scores. Extensive experiments not only indicate our method's competitive performance for common fluid scenes but also better robustness and reasonability under complex transparent fluid scenarios. Moreover, as the proposed surface-based layer representation and surface-only fluid simulation naturally disentangle the scene, interactive editing such as adding objects to the river and texture replacing could be easily achieved with realistic results.
LE-PDE++: Mamba for accelerating PDEs Simulations
Partial Differential Equations are foundational in modeling science and natural systems such as fluid dynamics and weather forecasting. The Latent Evolution of PDEs method is designed to address the computational intensity of classical and deep learning-based PDE solvers by proposing a scalable and efficient alternative. To enhance the efficiency and accuracy of LE-PDE, we incorporate the Mamba model, an advanced machine learning model known for its predictive efficiency and robustness in handling complex dynamic systems with a progressive learning strategy. The LE-PDE was tested on several benchmark problems. The method demonstrated a marked reduction in computational time compared to traditional solvers and standalone deep learning models while maintaining high accuracy in predicting system behavior over time. Our method doubles the inference speed compared to the LE-PDE while retaining the same level of parameter efficiency, making it well-suited for scenarios requiring long-term predictions.
PIG: Physics-Informed Gaussians as Adaptive Parametric Mesh Representations
The approximation of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) using neural networks has seen significant advancements through Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs). Despite their straightforward optimization framework and flexibility in implementing various PDEs, PINNs often suffer from limited accuracy due to the spectral bias of Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs), which struggle to effectively learn high-frequency and non-linear components. Recently, parametric mesh representations in combination with neural networks have been investigated as a promising approach to eliminate the inductive biases of neural networks. However, they usually require very high-resolution grids and a large number of collocation points to achieve high accuracy while avoiding overfitting issues. In addition, the fixed positions of the mesh parameters restrict their flexibility, making it challenging to accurately approximate complex PDEs. To overcome these limitations, we propose Physics-Informed Gaussians (PIGs), which combine feature embeddings using Gaussian functions with a lightweight neural network. Our approach uses trainable parameters for the mean and variance of each Gaussian, allowing for dynamic adjustment of their positions and shapes during training. This adaptability enables our model to optimally approximate PDE solutions, unlike models with fixed parameter positions. Furthermore, the proposed approach maintains the same optimization framework used in PINNs, allowing us to benefit from their excellent properties. Experimental results show the competitive performance of our model across various PDEs, demonstrating its potential as a robust tool for solving complex PDEs. Our project page is available at https://namgyukang.github.io/Physics-Informed-Gaussians/
NUNO: A General Framework for Learning Parametric PDEs with Non-Uniform Data
The neural operator has emerged as a powerful tool in learning mappings between function spaces in PDEs. However, when faced with real-world physical data, which are often highly non-uniformly distributed, it is challenging to use mesh-based techniques such as the FFT. To address this, we introduce the Non-Uniform Neural Operator (NUNO), a comprehensive framework designed for efficient operator learning with non-uniform data. Leveraging a K-D tree-based domain decomposition, we transform non-uniform data into uniform grids while effectively controlling interpolation error, thereby paralleling the speed and accuracy of learning from non-uniform data. We conduct extensive experiments on 2D elasticity, (2+1)D channel flow, and a 3D multi-physics heatsink, which, to our knowledge, marks a novel exploration into 3D PDE problems with complex geometries. Our framework has reduced error rates by up to 60% and enhanced training speeds by 2x to 30x. The code is now available at https://github.com/thu-ml/NUNO.
A Unified Module for Accelerating STABLE-DIFFUSION: LCM-LORA
This paper presents a comprehensive study on the unified module for accelerating stable-diffusion processes, specifically focusing on the lcm-lora module. Stable-diffusion processes play a crucial role in various scientific and engineering domains, and their acceleration is of paramount importance for efficient computational performance. The standard iterative procedures for solving fixed-source discrete ordinates problems often exhibit slow convergence, particularly in optically thick scenarios. To address this challenge, unconditionally stable diffusion-acceleration methods have been developed, aiming to enhance the computational efficiency of transport equations and discrete ordinates problems. This study delves into the theoretical foundations and numerical results of unconditionally stable diffusion synthetic acceleration methods, providing insights into their stability and performance for model discrete ordinates problems. Furthermore, the paper explores recent advancements in diffusion model acceleration, including on device acceleration of large diffusion models via gpu aware optimizations, highlighting the potential for significantly improved inference latency. The results and analyses in this study provide important insights into stable diffusion processes and have important ramifications for the creation and application of acceleration methods specifically, the lcm-lora module in a variety of computing environments.
MovingParts: Motion-based 3D Part Discovery in Dynamic Radiance Field
We present MovingParts, a NeRF-based method for dynamic scene reconstruction and part discovery. We consider motion as an important cue for identifying parts, that all particles on the same part share the common motion pattern. From the perspective of fluid simulation, existing deformation-based methods for dynamic NeRF can be seen as parameterizing the scene motion under the Eulerian view, i.e., focusing on specific locations in space through which the fluid flows as time passes. However, it is intractable to extract the motion of constituting objects or parts using the Eulerian view representation. In this work, we introduce the dual Lagrangian view and enforce representations under the Eulerian/Lagrangian views to be cycle-consistent. Under the Lagrangian view, we parameterize the scene motion by tracking the trajectory of particles on objects. The Lagrangian view makes it convenient to discover parts by factorizing the scene motion as a composition of part-level rigid motions. Experimentally, our method can achieve fast and high-quality dynamic scene reconstruction from even a single moving camera, and the induced part-based representation allows direct applications of part tracking, animation, 3D scene editing, etc.
Effective control of two-dimensional Rayleigh--Bénard convection: invariant multi-agent reinforcement learning is all you need
Rayleigh-B\'enard convection (RBC) is a recurrent phenomenon in several industrial and geoscience flows and a well-studied system from a fundamental fluid-mechanics viewpoint. However, controlling RBC, for example by modulating the spatial distribution of the bottom-plate heating in the canonical RBC configuration, remains a challenging topic for classical control-theory methods. In the present work, we apply deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for controlling RBC. We show that effective RBC control can be obtained by leveraging invariant multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), which takes advantage of the locality and translational invariance inherent to RBC flows inside wide channels. The MARL framework applied to RBC allows for an increase in the number of control segments without encountering the curse of dimensionality that would result from a naive increase in the DRL action-size dimension. This is made possible by the MARL ability for re-using the knowledge generated in different parts of the RBC domain. We show in a case study that MARL DRL is able to discover an advanced control strategy that destabilizes the spontaneous RBC double-cell pattern, changes the topology of RBC by coalescing adjacent convection cells, and actively controls the resulting coalesced cell to bring it to a new stable configuration. This modified flow configuration results in reduced convective heat transfer, which is beneficial in several industrial processes. Therefore, our work both shows the potential of MARL DRL for controlling large RBC systems, as well as demonstrates the possibility for DRL to discover strategies that move the RBC configuration between different topological configurations, yielding desirable heat-transfer characteristics. These results are useful for both gaining further understanding of the intrinsic properties of RBC, as well as for developing industrial applications.
Improving the Training of Rectified Flows
Diffusion models have shown great promise for image and video generation, but sampling from state-of-the-art models requires expensive numerical integration of a generative ODE. One approach for tackling this problem is rectified flows, which iteratively learn smooth ODE paths that are less susceptible to truncation error. However, rectified flows still require a relatively large number of function evaluations (NFEs). In this work, we propose improved techniques for training rectified flows, allowing them to compete with knowledge distillation methods even in the low NFE setting. Our main insight is that under realistic settings, a single iteration of the Reflow algorithm for training rectified flows is sufficient to learn nearly straight trajectories; hence, the current practice of using multiple Reflow iterations is unnecessary. We thus propose techniques to improve one-round training of rectified flows, including a U-shaped timestep distribution and LPIPS-Huber premetric. With these techniques, we improve the FID of the previous 2-rectified flow by up to 72% in the 1 NFE setting on CIFAR-10. On ImageNet 64times64, our improved rectified flow outperforms the state-of-the-art distillation methods such as consistency distillation and progressive distillation in both one-step and two-step settings and rivals the performance of improved consistency training (iCT) in FID. Code is available at https://github.com/sangyun884/rfpp.
ConDiff: A Challenging Dataset for Neural Solvers of Partial Differential Equations
We present ConDiff, a novel dataset for scientific machine learning. ConDiff focuses on the parametric diffusion equation with space dependent coefficients, a fundamental problem in many applications of partial differential equations (PDEs). The main novelty of the proposed dataset is that we consider discontinuous coefficients with high contrast. These coefficient functions are sampled from a selected set of distributions. This class of problems is not only of great academic interest, but is also the basis for describing various environmental and industrial problems. In this way, ConDiff shortens the gap with real-world problems while remaining fully synthetic and easy to use. ConDiff consists of a diverse set of diffusion equations with coefficients covering a wide range of contrast levels and heterogeneity with a measurable complexity metric for clearer comparison between different coefficient functions. We baseline ConDiff on standard deep learning models in the field of scientific machine learning. By providing a large number of problem instances, each with its own coefficient function and right-hand side, we hope to encourage the development of novel physics-based deep learning approaches, such as neural operators, ultimately driving progress towards more accurate and efficient solutions of complex PDE problems.
Learning Semilinear Neural Operators : A Unified Recursive Framework For Prediction And Data Assimilation
Recent advances in the theory of Neural Operators (NOs) have enabled fast and accurate computation of the solutions to complex systems described by partial differential equations (PDEs). Despite their great success, current NO-based solutions face important challenges when dealing with spatio-temporal PDEs over long time scales. Specifically, the current theory of NOs does not present a systematic framework to perform data assimilation and efficiently correct the evolution of PDE solutions over time based on sparsely sampled noisy measurements. In this paper, we propose a learning-based state-space approach to compute the solution operators to infinite-dimensional semilinear PDEs. Exploiting the structure of semilinear PDEs and the theory of nonlinear observers in function spaces, we develop a flexible recursive method that allows for both prediction and data assimilation by combining prediction and correction operations. The proposed framework is capable of producing fast and accurate predictions over long time horizons, dealing with irregularly sampled noisy measurements to correct the solution, and benefits from the decoupling between the spatial and temporal dynamics of this class of PDEs. We show through experiments on the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky, Navier-Stokes and Korteweg-de Vries equations that the proposed model is robust to noise and can leverage arbitrary amounts of measurements to correct its prediction over a long time horizon with little computational overhead.
Operator Learning with Neural Fields: Tackling PDEs on General Geometries
Machine learning approaches for solving partial differential equations require learning mappings between function spaces. While convolutional or graph neural networks are constrained to discretized functions, neural operators present a promising milestone toward mapping functions directly. Despite impressive results they still face challenges with respect to the domain geometry and typically rely on some form of discretization. In order to alleviate such limitations, we present CORAL, a new method that leverages coordinate-based networks for solving PDEs on general geometries. CORAL is designed to remove constraints on the input mesh, making it applicable to any spatial sampling and geometry. Its ability extends to diverse problem domains, including PDE solving, spatio-temporal forecasting, and inverse problems like geometric design. CORAL demonstrates robust performance across multiple resolutions and performs well in both convex and non-convex domains, surpassing or performing on par with state-of-the-art models.
General Covariance Data Augmentation for Neural PDE Solvers
The growing body of research shows how to replace classical partial differential equation (PDE) integrators with neural networks. The popular strategy is to generate the input-output pairs with a PDE solver, train the neural network in the regression setting, and use the trained model as a cheap surrogate for the solver. The bottleneck in this scheme is the number of expensive queries of a PDE solver needed to generate the dataset. To alleviate the problem, we propose a computationally cheap augmentation strategy based on general covariance and simple random coordinate transformations. Our approach relies on the fact that physical laws are independent of the coordinate choice, so the change in the coordinate system preserves the type of a parametric PDE and only changes PDE's data (e.g., initial conditions, diffusion coefficient). For tried neural networks and partial differential equations, proposed augmentation improves test error by 23% on average. The worst observed result is a 17% increase in test error for multilayer perceptron, and the best case is a 80% decrease for dilated residual network.
Respecting causality is all you need for training physics-informed neural networks
While the popularity of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) is steadily rising, to this date PINNs have not been successful in simulating dynamical systems whose solution exhibits multi-scale, chaotic or turbulent behavior. In this work we attribute this shortcoming to the inability of existing PINNs formulations to respect the spatio-temporal causal structure that is inherent to the evolution of physical systems. We argue that this is a fundamental limitation and a key source of error that can ultimately steer PINN models to converge towards erroneous solutions. We address this pathology by proposing a simple re-formulation of PINNs loss functions that can explicitly account for physical causality during model training. We demonstrate that this simple modification alone is enough to introduce significant accuracy improvements, as well as a practical quantitative mechanism for assessing the convergence of a PINNs model. We provide state-of-the-art numerical results across a series of benchmarks for which existing PINNs formulations fail, including the chaotic Lorenz system, the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation in the chaotic regime, and the Navier-Stokes equations in the turbulent regime. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that PINNs have been successful in simulating such systems, introducing new opportunities for their applicability to problems of industrial complexity.
Causal Inference with Conditional Front-Door Adjustment and Identifiable Variational Autoencoder
An essential and challenging problem in causal inference is causal effect estimation from observational data. The problem becomes more difficult with the presence of unobserved confounding variables. The front-door adjustment is a practical approach for dealing with unobserved confounding variables. However, the restriction for the standard front-door adjustment is difficult to satisfy in practice. In this paper, we relax some of the restrictions by proposing the concept of conditional front-door (CFD) adjustment and develop the theorem that guarantees the causal effect identifiability of CFD adjustment. Furthermore, as it is often impossible for a CFD variable to be given in practice, it is desirable to learn it from data. By leveraging the ability of deep generative models, we propose CFDiVAE to learn the representation of the CFD adjustment variable directly from data with the identifiable Variational AutoEncoder and formally prove the model identifiability. Extensive experiments on synthetic datasets validate the effectiveness of CFDiVAE and its superiority over existing methods. The experiments also show that the performance of CFDiVAE is less sensitive to the causal strength of unobserved confounding variables. We further apply CFDiVAE to a real-world dataset to demonstrate its potential application.
Speed and Density Planning for a Speed-Constrained Robot Swarm Through a Virtual Tube
The planning and control of a robot swarm in a complex environment have attracted increasing attention. To this end, the idea of virtual tubes has been taken up in our previous work. Specifically, a virtual tube with varying widths has been planned to avoid collisions with obstacles in a complex environment. Based on the planned virtual tube for a large number of speed-constrained robots, the average forward speed and density along the virtual tube are further planned in this paper to ensure safety and improve efficiency. Compared with the existing methods, the proposed method is based on global information and can be applied to traversing narrow spaces for speed-constrained robot swarms. Numerical simulations and experiments are conducted to show that the safety and efficiency of the passing-through process are improved. A video about simulations and experiments is available on https://youtu.be/lJHdMQMqSpc.
Compositional Generative Inverse Design
Inverse design, where we seek to design input variables in order to optimize an underlying objective function, is an important problem that arises across fields such as mechanical engineering to aerospace engineering. Inverse design is typically formulated as an optimization problem, with recent works leveraging optimization across learned dynamics models. However, as models are optimized they tend to fall into adversarial modes, preventing effective sampling. We illustrate that by instead optimizing over the learned energy function captured by the diffusion model, we can avoid such adversarial examples and significantly improve design performance. We further illustrate how such a design system is compositional, enabling us to combine multiple different diffusion models representing subcomponents of our desired system to design systems with every specified component. In an N-body interaction task and a challenging 2D multi-airfoil design task, we demonstrate that by composing the learned diffusion model at test time, our method allows us to design initial states and boundary shapes that are more complex than those in the training data. Our method generalizes to more objects for N-body dataset and discovers formation flying to minimize drag in the multi-airfoil design task. Project website and code can be found at https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/cindm.
Kolmogorov Arnold Informed neural network: A physics-informed deep learning framework for solving PDEs based on Kolmogorov Arnold Networks
AI for partial differential equations (PDEs) has garnered significant attention, particularly with the emergence of Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). The recent advent of Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) indicates that there is potential to revisit and enhance the previously MLP-based PINNs. Compared to MLPs, KANs offer interpretability and require fewer parameters. PDEs can be described in various forms, such as strong form, energy form, and inverse form. While mathematically equivalent, these forms are not computationally equivalent, making the exploration of different PDE formulations significant in computational physics. Thus, we propose different PDE forms based on KAN instead of MLP, termed Kolmogorov-Arnold-Informed Neural Network (KINN). We systematically compare MLP and KAN in various numerical examples of PDEs, including multi-scale, singularity, stress concentration, nonlinear hyperelasticity, heterogeneous, and complex geometry problems. Our results demonstrate that KINN significantly outperforms MLP in terms of accuracy and convergence speed for numerous PDEs in computational solid mechanics, except for the complex geometry problem. This highlights KINN's potential for more efficient and accurate PDE solutions in AI for PDEs.
Coupled BEM-FEM for the convected Helmholtz equation with non-uniform flow in a bounded domain
We consider the convected Helmholtz equation modeling linear acoustic propagation at a fixed frequency in a subsonic flow around a scattering object. The flow is supposed to be uniform in the exterior domain far from the object, and potential in the interior domain close to the object. Our key idea is the reformulation of the original problem using the Prandtl--Glauert transformation on the whole flow domain, yielding (i) the classical Helmholtz equation in the exterior domain and (ii) an anisotropic diffusive PDE with skew-symmetric first-order perturbation in the interior domain such that its transmission condition at the coupling boundary naturally fits the Neumann condition from the classical Helmholtz equation. Then, efficient off-the-shelf tools can be used to perform the BEM-FEM coupling, leading to two novel variational formulations for the convected Helmholtz equation. The first formulation involves one surface unknown and can be affected by resonant frequencies, while the second formulation avoids resonant frequencies and involves two surface unknowns. Numerical simulations are presented to compare the two formulations.
Mosaic-SDF for 3D Generative Models
Current diffusion or flow-based generative models for 3D shapes divide to two: distilling pre-trained 2D image diffusion models, and training directly on 3D shapes. When training a diffusion or flow models on 3D shapes a crucial design choice is the shape representation. An effective shape representation needs to adhere three design principles: it should allow an efficient conversion of large 3D datasets to the representation form; it should provide a good tradeoff of approximation power versus number of parameters; and it should have a simple tensorial form that is compatible with existing powerful neural architectures. While standard 3D shape representations such as volumetric grids and point clouds do not adhere to all these principles simultaneously, we advocate in this paper a new representation that does. We introduce Mosaic-SDF (M-SDF): a simple 3D shape representation that approximates the Signed Distance Function (SDF) of a given shape by using a set of local grids spread near the shape's boundary. The M-SDF representation is fast to compute for each shape individually making it readily parallelizable; it is parameter efficient as it only covers the space around the shape's boundary; and it has a simple matrix form, compatible with Transformer-based architectures. We demonstrate the efficacy of the M-SDF representation by using it to train a 3D generative flow model including class-conditioned generation with the 3D Warehouse dataset, and text-to-3D generation using a dataset of about 600k caption-shape pairs.
ConvMesh: Reimagining Mesh Quality Through Convex Optimization
Mesh generation has become a critical topic in recent years, forming the foundation of all 3D objects used across various applications, such as virtual reality, gaming, and 3D printing. With advancements in computational resources and machine learning, neural networks have emerged as powerful tools for generating high-quality 3D object representations, enabling accurate scene and object reconstructions. Despite these advancements, many methods produce meshes that lack realism or exhibit geometric and textural flaws, necessitating additional processing to improve their quality. This research introduces a convex optimization programming called disciplined convex programming to enhance existing meshes by refining their texture and geometry with a conic solver. By focusing on a sparse set of point clouds from both the original and target meshes, this method demonstrates significant improvements in mesh quality with minimal data requirements. To evaluate the approach, the classical dolphin mesh dataset from Facebook AI was used as a case study, with optimization performed using the CVXPY library. The results reveal promising potential for streamlined and effective mesh refinement.
FD-Net with Auxiliary Time Steps: Fast Prediction of PDEs using Hessian-Free Trust-Region Methods
Discovering the underlying physical behavior of complex systems is a crucial, but less well-understood topic in many engineering disciplines. This study proposes a finite-difference inspired convolutional neural network framework to learn hidden partial differential equations from given data and iteratively estimate future dynamical behavior. The methodology designs the filter sizes such that they mimic the finite difference between the neighboring points. By learning the governing equation, the network predicts the future evolution of the solution by using only a few trainable parameters. In this paper, we provide numerical results to compare the efficiency of the second-order Trust-Region Conjugate Gradient (TRCG) method with the first-order ADAM optimizer.
LEONARDO: A Pan-European Pre-Exascale Supercomputer for HPC and AI Applications
A new pre-exascale computer cluster has been designed to foster scientific progress and competitive innovation across European research systems, it is called LEONARDO. This paper describes the general architecture of the system and focuses on the technologies adopted for its GPU-accelerated partition. High density processing elements, fast data movement capabilities and mature software stack collections allow the machine to run intensive workloads in a flexible and scalable way. Scientific applications from traditional High Performance Computing (HPC) as well as emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) domains can benefit from this large apparatus in terms of time and energy to solution.
Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow
We present rectified flow, a surprisingly simple approach to learning (neural) ordinary differential equation (ODE) models to transport between two empirically observed distributions \pi_0 and \pi_1, hence providing a unified solution to generative modeling and domain transfer, among various other tasks involving distribution transport. The idea of rectified flow is to learn the ODE to follow the straight paths connecting the points drawn from \pi_0 and \pi_1 as much as possible. This is achieved by solving a straightforward nonlinear least squares optimization problem, which can be easily scaled to large models without introducing extra parameters beyond standard supervised learning. The straight paths are special and preferred because they are the shortest paths between two points, and can be simulated exactly without time discretization and hence yield computationally efficient models. We show that the procedure of learning a rectified flow from data, called rectification, turns an arbitrary coupling of \pi_0 and \pi_1 to a new deterministic coupling with provably non-increasing convex transport costs. In addition, recursively applying rectification allows us to obtain a sequence of flows with increasingly straight paths, which can be simulated accurately with coarse time discretization in the inference phase. In empirical studies, we show that rectified flow performs superbly on image generation, image-to-image translation, and domain adaptation. In particular, on image generation and translation, our method yields nearly straight flows that give high quality results even with a single Euler discretization step.
Learning Neural Constitutive Laws From Motion Observations for Generalizable PDE Dynamics
We propose a hybrid neural network (NN) and PDE approach for learning generalizable PDE dynamics from motion observations. Many NN approaches learn an end-to-end model that implicitly models both the governing PDE and constitutive models (or material models). Without explicit PDE knowledge, these approaches cannot guarantee physical correctness and have limited generalizability. We argue that the governing PDEs are often well-known and should be explicitly enforced rather than learned. Instead, constitutive models are particularly suitable for learning due to their data-fitting nature. To this end, we introduce a new framework termed "Neural Constitutive Laws" (NCLaw), which utilizes a network architecture that strictly guarantees standard constitutive priors, including rotation equivariance and undeformed state equilibrium. We embed this network inside a differentiable simulation and train the model by minimizing a loss function based on the difference between the simulation and the motion observation. We validate NCLaw on various large-deformation dynamical systems, ranging from solids to fluids. After training on a single motion trajectory, our method generalizes to new geometries, initial/boundary conditions, temporal ranges, and even multi-physics systems. On these extremely out-of-distribution generalization tasks, NCLaw is orders-of-magnitude more accurate than previous NN approaches. Real-world experiments demonstrate our method's ability to learn constitutive laws from videos.
Solving High Frequency and Multi-Scale PDEs with Gaussian Processes
Machine learning based solvers have garnered much attention in physical simulation and scientific computing, with a prominent example, physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). However, PINNs often struggle to solve high-frequency and multi-scale PDEs, which can be due to spectral bias during neural network training. To address this problem, we resort to the Gaussian process (GP) framework. To flexibly capture the dominant frequencies, we model the power spectrum of the PDE solution with a student t mixture or Gaussian mixture. We apply the inverse Fourier transform to obtain the covariance function (by Wiener-Khinchin theorem). The covariance derived from the Gaussian mixture spectrum corresponds to the known spectral mixture kernel. Next, we estimate the mixture weights in the log domain, which we show is equivalent to placing a Jeffreys prior. It automatically induces sparsity, prunes excessive frequencies, and adjusts the remaining toward the ground truth. Third, to enable efficient and scalable computation on massive collocation points, which are critical to capture high frequencies, we place the collocation points on a grid, and multiply our covariance function at each input dimension. We use the GP conditional mean to predict the solution and its derivatives so as to fit the boundary condition and the equation itself. As a result, we can derive a Kronecker product structure in the covariance matrix. We use Kronecker product properties and multilinear algebra to promote computational efficiency and scalability, without low-rank approximations. We show the advantage of our method in systematic experiments. The code is released at https://github.com/xuangu-fang/Gaussian-Process-Slover-for-High-Freq-PDE.
Balancing Computational Efficiency and Forecast Error in Machine Learning-based Time-Series Forecasting: Insights from Live Experiments on Meteorological Nowcasting
Machine learning for time-series forecasting remains a key area of research. Despite successful application of many machine learning techniques, relating computational efficiency to forecast error remains an under-explored domain. This paper addresses this topic through a series of real-time experiments to quantify the relationship between computational cost and forecast error using meteorological nowcasting as an example use-case. We employ a variety of popular regression techniques (XGBoost, FC-MLP, Transformer, and LSTM) for multi-horizon, short-term forecasting of three variables (temperature, wind speed, and cloud cover) for multiple locations. During a 5-day live experiment, 4000 data sources were streamed for training and inferencing 144 models per hour. These models were parameterized to explore forecast error for two computational cost minimization methods: a novel auto-adaptive data reduction technique (Variance Horizon) and a performance-based concept drift-detection mechanism. Forecast error of all model variations were benchmarked in real-time against a state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction model. Performance was assessed using classical and novel evaluation metrics. Results indicate that using the Variance Horizon reduced computational usage by more than 50\%, while increasing between 0-15\% in error. Meanwhile, performance-based retraining reduced computational usage by up to 90\% while also improving forecast error by up to 10\%. Finally, the combination of both the Variance Horizon and performance-based retraining outperformed other model configurations by up to 99.7\% when considering error normalized to computational usage.
Momentum-based minimization of the Ginzburg-Landau functional on Euclidean spaces and graphs
We study the momentum-based minimization of a diffuse perimeter functional on Euclidean spaces and on graphs with applications to semi-supervised classification tasks in machine learning. While the gradient flow in the task at hand is a parabolic partial differential equation, the momentum-method corresponds to a damped hyperbolic PDE, leading to qualitatively and quantitatively different trajectories. Using a convex-concave splitting-based FISTA-type time discretization, we demonstrate empirically that momentum can lead to faster convergence if the time step size is large but not too large. With large time steps, the PDE analysis offers only limited insight into the geometric behavior of solutions and typical hyperbolic phenomena like loss of regularity are not be observed in sample simulations.
One is All: Bridging the Gap Between Neural Radiance Fields Architectures with Progressive Volume Distillation
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) methods have proved effective as compact, high-quality and versatile representations for 3D scenes, and enable downstream tasks such as editing, retrieval, navigation, etc. Various neural architectures are vying for the core structure of NeRF, including the plain Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), sparse tensors, low-rank tensors, hashtables and their compositions. Each of these representations has its particular set of trade-offs. For example, the hashtable-based representations admit faster training and rendering but their lack of clear geometric meaning hampers downstream tasks like spatial-relation-aware editing. In this paper, we propose Progressive Volume Distillation (PVD), a systematic distillation method that allows any-to-any conversions between different architectures, including MLP, sparse or low-rank tensors, hashtables and their compositions. PVD consequently empowers downstream applications to optimally adapt the neural representations for the task at hand in a post hoc fashion. The conversions are fast, as distillation is progressively performed on different levels of volume representations, from shallower to deeper. We also employ special treatment of density to deal with its specific numerical instability problem. Empirical evidence is presented to validate our method on the NeRF-Synthetic, LLFF and TanksAndTemples datasets. For example, with PVD, an MLP-based NeRF model can be distilled from a hashtable-based Instant-NGP model at a 10X~20X faster speed than being trained the original NeRF from scratch, while achieving a superior level of synthesis quality. Code is available at https://github.com/megvii-research/AAAI2023-PVD.
Gaussian Splashing: Dynamic Fluid Synthesis with Gaussian Splatting
We demonstrate the feasibility of integrating physics-based animations of solids and fluids with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to create novel effects in virtual scenes reconstructed using 3DGS. Leveraging the coherence of the Gaussian splatting and position-based dynamics (PBD) in the underlying representation, we manage rendering, view synthesis, and the dynamics of solids and fluids in a cohesive manner. Similar to Gaussian shader, we enhance each Gaussian kernel with an added normal, aligning the kernel's orientation with the surface normal to refine the PBD simulation. This approach effectively eliminates spiky noises that arise from rotational deformation in solids. It also allows us to integrate physically based rendering to augment the dynamic surface reflections on fluids. Consequently, our framework is capable of realistically reproducing surface highlights on dynamic fluids and facilitating interactions between scene objects and fluids from new views. For more information, please visit our project page at https://amysteriouscat.github.io/GaussianSplashing/.