Space and Time Continuous Physics Simulation from Partial Observations

Steeven Janny  Madiha Nadri Julie Digne Christian Wolf
LIRIS LAGEPP LIRIS Naver Labs Europe
INSA Lyon, France Univ. Claude Bernard, France CNRS, Lyon, France Grenoble, France





Abstract

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 computational 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.


Results

2D Navier Dataset

Spatial Resolution: 25% Temporal resolution: 1/4

Time:



Spatial Resolution: 5% Temporal resolution: 1/1

Time:



3D Shallow Water

Spatial Resolution: 25% Temporal resolution: 1/1

Ground Truth
Ours
DINo
MeshGraphNet
Magnet
Time:

Drag the spheres to rotate




Spatial Resolution: 5% Temporal resolution: 1/1

Ground Truth
Ours
DINo
MeshGraphNet
Magnet
Time:

Drag the spheres to rotate





Acknowledgements

We recognize support through French grants Delicio (ANR-19-CE23-0006) of call CE23 Intelligence Artificielle and Remember (ANR-20-CHIA0018), of call Chaires IA hors centres. This work was performed using HPC resources from GENCI-IDRIS (Grant 2023-AD010614014).




Model

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