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Sep 8

Finetuning AI Foundation Models to Develop Subgrid-Scale Parameterizations: A Case Study on Atmospheric Gravity Waves

Global climate models parameterize a range of atmospheric-oceanic processes like gravity waves, clouds, moist convection, and turbulence that cannot be sufficiently resolved. These subgrid-scale closures for unresolved processes are a leading source of model uncertainty. Here, we present a new approach to developing machine learning parameterizations of small-scale climate processes by fine-tuning a pre-trained AI foundation model (FM). FMs are largely unexplored in climate research. A pre-trained encoder-decoder from a 2.3 billion parameter FM (NASA and IBM Research's Prithvi WxC) -- which contains a latent probabilistic representation of atmospheric evolution -- is fine-tuned (or reused) to create a deep learning parameterization for atmospheric gravity waves (GWs). The parameterization captures GW effects for a coarse-resolution climate model by learning the fluxes from an atmospheric reanalysis with 10 times finer resolution. A comparison of monthly averages and instantaneous evolution with a machine learning model baseline (an Attention U-Net) reveals superior predictive performance of the FM parameterization throughout the atmosphere, even in regions excluded from pre-training. This performance boost is quantified using the Hellinger distance, which is 0.11 for the baseline and 0.06 for the fine-tuned model. Our findings emphasize the versatility and reusability of FMs, which could be used to accomplish a range of atmosphere- and climate-related applications, leading the way for the creation of observations-driven and physically accurate parameterizations for more earth-system processes.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 3, 2025

Multi-fidelity climate model parameterization for better generalization and extrapolation

Machine-learning-based parameterizations (i.e. representation of sub-grid processes) of global climate models or turbulent simulations have recently been proposed as a powerful alternative to physical, but empirical, representations, offering a lower computational cost and higher accuracy. Yet, those approaches still suffer from a lack of generalization and extrapolation beyond the training data, which is however critical to projecting climate change or unobserved regimes of turbulence. Here we show that a multi-fidelity approach, which integrates datasets of different accuracy and abundance, can provide the best of both worlds: the capacity to extrapolate leveraging the physically-based parameterization and a higher accuracy using the machine-learning-based parameterizations. In an application to climate modeling, the multi-fidelity framework yields more accurate climate projections without requiring major increase in computational resources. Our multi-fidelity randomized prior networks (MF-RPNs) combine physical parameterization data as low-fidelity and storm-resolving historical run's data as high-fidelity. To extrapolate beyond the training data, the MF-RPNs are tested on high-fidelity warming scenarios, +4K, data. We show the MF-RPN's capacity to return much more skillful predictions compared to either low- or high-fidelity (historical data) simulations trained only on one regime while providing trustworthy uncertainty quantification across a wide range of scenarios. Our approach paves the way for the use of machine-learning based methods that can optimally leverage historical observations or high-fidelity simulations and extrapolate to unseen regimes such as climate change.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 18, 2023

NeuralDEM -- Real-time Simulation of Industrial Particulate Flows

Advancements in computing power have made it possible to numerically simulate large-scale fluid-mechanical and/or particulate systems, many of which are integral to core industrial processes. Among the different numerical methods available, the discrete element method (DEM) provides one of the most accurate representations of a wide range of physical systems involving granular and discontinuous materials. Consequently, DEM has become a widely accepted approach for tackling engineering problems connected to granular flows and powder mechanics. Additionally, DEM can be integrated with grid-based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods, enabling the simulation of chemical processes taking place, e.g., in fluidized beds. However, DEM is computationally intensive because of the intrinsic multiscale nature of particulate systems, restricting simulation duration or number of particles. Towards this end, NeuralDEM presents an end-to-end approach to replace slow numerical DEM routines with fast, adaptable deep learning surrogates. NeuralDEM is capable of picturing long-term transport processes across different regimes using macroscopic observables without any reference to microscopic model parameters. First, NeuralDEM treats the Lagrangian discretization of DEM as an underlying continuous field, while simultaneously modeling macroscopic behavior directly as additional auxiliary fields. Second, NeuralDEM introduces multi-branch neural operators scalable to real-time modeling of industrially-sized scenarios - from slow and pseudo-steady to fast and transient. Such scenarios have previously posed insurmountable challenges for deep learning models. Notably, NeuralDEM faithfully models coupled CFD-DEM fluidized bed reactors of 160k CFD cells and 500k DEM particles for trajectories of 28s. NeuralDEM will open many new doors to advanced engineering and much faster process cycles.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 14, 2024

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".

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 16, 2023

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.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 1, 2024

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.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 17, 2024

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 10, 2023

Synthetic Lagrangian Turbulence by Generative Diffusion Models

Lagrangian turbulence lies at the core of numerous applied and fundamental problems related to the physics of dispersion and mixing in engineering, bio-fluids, atmosphere, oceans, and astrophysics. Despite exceptional theoretical, numerical, and experimental efforts conducted over the past thirty years, no existing models are capable of faithfully reproducing statistical and topological properties exhibited by particle trajectories in turbulence. We propose a machine learning approach, based on a state-of-the-art diffusion model, to generate single-particle trajectories in three-dimensional turbulence at high Reynolds numbers, thereby bypassing the need for direct numerical simulations or experiments to obtain reliable Lagrangian data. Our model demonstrates the ability to reproduce most statistical benchmarks across time scales, including the fat-tail distribution for velocity increments, the anomalous power law, and the increased intermittency around the dissipative scale. Slight deviations are observed below the dissipative scale, particularly in the acceleration and flatness statistics. Surprisingly, the model exhibits strong generalizability for extreme events, producing events of higher intensity and rarity that still match the realistic statistics. This paves the way for producing synthetic high-quality datasets for pre-training various downstream applications of Lagrangian turbulence.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 27, 2024

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.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 26, 2023

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 21, 2023

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.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 20, 2023

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.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 8, 2023

Segmentation of 3D pore space from CT images using curvilinear skeleton: application to numerical simulation of microbial decomposition

Recent advances in 3D X-ray Computed Tomographic (CT) sensors have stimulated research efforts to unveil the extremely complex micro-scale processes that control the activity of soil microorganisms. Voxel-based description (up to hundreds millions voxels) of the pore space can be extracted, from grey level 3D CT scanner images, by means of simple image processing tools. Classical methods for numerical simulation of biological dynamics using mesh of voxels, such as Lattice Boltzmann Model (LBM), are too much time consuming. Thus, the use of more compact and reliable geometrical representations of pore space can drastically decrease the computational cost of the simulations. Several recent works propose basic analytic volume primitives (e.g. spheres, generalized cylinders, ellipsoids) to define a piece-wise approximation of pore space for numerical simulation of draining, diffusion and microbial decomposition. Such approaches work well but the drawback is that it generates approximation errors. In the present work, we study another alternative where pore space is described by means of geometrically relevant connected subsets of voxels (regions) computed from the curvilinear skeleton. Indeed, many works use the curvilinear skeleton (3D medial axis) for analyzing and partitioning 3D shapes within various domains (medicine, material sciences, petroleum engineering, etc.) but only a few ones in soil sciences. Within the context of soil sciences, most studies dealing with 3D medial axis focus on the determination of pore throats. Here, we segment pore space using curvilinear skeleton in order to achieve numerical simulation of microbial decomposition (including diffusion processes). We validate simulation outputs by comparison with other methods using different pore space geometrical representations (balls, voxels).

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 4, 2023

Adaptive Mesh-Quantization for Neural PDE Solvers

Physical systems commonly exhibit spatially varying complexity, presenting a significant challenge for neural PDE solvers. While Graph Neural Networks can handle the irregular meshes required for complex geometries and boundary conditions, they still apply uniform computational effort across all nodes regardless of the underlying physics complexity. This leads to inefficient resource allocation where computationally simple regions receive the same treatment as complex phenomena. We address this challenge by introducing Adaptive Mesh Quantization: spatially adaptive quantization across mesh node, edge, and cluster features, dynamically adjusting the bit-width used by a quantized model. We propose an adaptive bit-width allocation strategy driven by a lightweight auxiliary model that identifies high-loss regions in the input mesh. This enables dynamic resource distribution in the main model, where regions of higher difficulty are allocated increased bit-width, optimizing computational resource utilization. We demonstrate our framework's effectiveness by integrating it with two state-of-the-art models, MP-PDE and GraphViT, to evaluate performance across multiple tasks: 2D Darcy flow, large-scale unsteady fluid dynamics in 2D, steady-state Navier-Stokes simulations in 3D, and a 2D hyper-elasticity problem. Our framework demonstrates consistent Pareto improvements over uniformly quantized baselines, yielding up to 50% improvements in performance at the same cost.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 23, 2025

A Point-Cloud Deep Learning Framework for Prediction of Fluid Flow Fields on Irregular Geometries

We present a novel deep learning framework for flow field predictions in irregular domains when the solution is a function of the geometry of either the domain or objects inside the domain. Grid vertices in a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) domain are viewed as point clouds and used as inputs to a neural network based on the PointNet architecture, which learns an end-to-end mapping between spatial positions and CFD quantities. Using our approach, (i) the network inherits desirable features of unstructured meshes (e.g., fine and coarse point spacing near the object surface and in the far field, respectively), which minimizes network training cost; (ii) object geometry is accurately represented through vertices located on object boundaries, which maintains boundary smoothness and allows the network to detect small changes between geometries; and (iii) no data interpolation is utilized for creating training data; thus accuracy of the CFD data is preserved. None of these features are achievable by extant methods based on projecting scattered CFD data into Cartesian grids and then using regular convolutional neural networks. Incompressible laminar steady flow past a cylinder with various shapes for its cross section is considered. The mass and momentum of predicted fields are conserved. We test the generalizability of our network by predicting the flow around multiple objects as well as an airfoil, even though only single objects and no airfoils are observed during training. The network predicts the flow fields hundreds of times faster than our conventional CFD solver, while maintaining excellent to reasonable accuracy.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 15, 2021

No 3D Matrices: A Unified Tensor-Product View of Matrix-Free Cartesian PDE Solvers

Every Cartesian three-dimensional PDE solver hides a structural secret that production CFD codes have used for half a century and that graduate-level textbooks rarely state plainly. The derivative matrices, the compact Padé line solves, the Galerkin mass inversions, the alternating-direction-implicit substeps, and even the fast Poisson and Helmholtz diagonalization transforms all factor along the coordinate axes and collapse into repeated one-dimensional banded kernels executed along the grid lines. The three-dimensional operator exists only on paper; it is never assembled, factored, or stored. This paper is the manual for that collapse. We derive the Kronecker-product algebra that makes it exact, carry it cleanly through central differences, compact schemes, tensor-product Galerkin, B-spline and isogeometric methods, collocation, ADI time stepping, and direct Poisson and Helmholtz solves, and bring into the open the three production tricks that turn the reduction into hardware-conscious floating-point throughput on real machines: the multi-right-hand-side reshape that exposes a sweep as one batched line kernel (a dense BLAS-3 GEMM when the line factor is dense or element-local, a banded or stencil kernel when it is not), the sum factorization that rescues high-order Galerkin from the O(p^{2d}) quadrature trap, and the pencil decomposition that keeps every direction contiguous across an MPI cluster. For fixed stencil width or fixed polynomial degree, the compute cost stays O(N) in the total number of unknowns N = N_x N_y N_z; the operator storage drops to O(N_x + N_y + N_z) up to bandwidth constants; direct separable Poisson and Helmholtz solvers add the expected transform cost; the line kernels are embarrassingly parallel. These facts are familiar to practitioners but rarely assembled in one place; this paper collects them and shows how to use them.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 22

Finite difference method in prolate spheroidal coordinates for freely suspended spheroidal particles in linear flows of viscous and viscoelastic fluids

A finite difference scheme is used to develop a numerical method to solve the flow of an unbounded viscoelastic fluid with zero to moderate inertia around a prolate spheroidal particle. The equations are written in prolate spheroidal coordinates, and the shape of the particle is exactly resolved as one of the coordinate surfaces representing the inner boundary of the computational domain. As the prolate spheroidal grid is naturally clustered near the particle surface, good resolution is obtained in the regions where the gradients of relevant flow variables are most significant. This coordinate system also allows large domain sizes with a reasonable number of mesh points to simulate unbounded fluid around a particle. Changing the aspect ratio of the inner computational boundary enables simulations of different particle shapes ranging from a sphere to a slender fiber. Numerical studies of the latter particle shape allow testing of slender body theories. The mass and momentum equations are solved with a Schur complement approach allowing us to solve the zero inertia case necessary to isolate the viscoelastic effects. The singularities associated with the coordinate system are overcome using L'Hopital's rule. A straightforward imposition of conditions representing a time-varying combination of linear flows on the outer boundary allows us to study various flows with the same computational domain geometry. {For the special but important case of zero fluid and particle inertia we obtain a novel formulation that satisfies the force- and torque-free constraint in an iteration-free manner.} The numerical method is demonstrated for various flows of Newtonian and viscoelastic fluids around spheres and spheroids (including those with large aspect ratio). Good agreement is demonstrated with existing theoretical and numerical results.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 9, 2023

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 17, 2024

Beyond monoculture: Polydisperse moment methods for sub-stellar atmosphere cloud microphysics II. A three-moment gamma distribution formulation for GCM applications

Context. Understanding how the shape of cloud particle size distributions affects the atmospheric properties of sub-stellar atmospheres is a key area to explore, particularly in the JWST era of broad wavelength coverage, where observations are sensitive to particle size distributions. It is therefore important to elucidate how underlying cloud microphysical processes influence the size distribution, in order to better understand how clouds affect observed atmospheric properties. Aims. In this follow-up paper, we aim to extend our sub-stellar atmosphere microphysical cloud formation framework from Paper I to include effects of assuming a polydisperse gamma particle size distribution, requiring a three-moment solution set of equations. Methods. We develop a three-moment framework for sub-stellar mineral cloud particle microphysical nucleation, condensation, evaporation and collisional growth assuming a gamma distribution. As in the previous paper, we demonstrate the effects of polydispersity using a simple one-dimensional Y-dwarf KCl cloud formation scenario, and compare the results with the monodisperse case. Results. Our three-moment scheme provides a generalised framework applicable to any size distribution with a defined moment generation expression. In our test case, we show that the gamma distribution evolves with altitude, initially broad at the cloud base and narrowing at lower pressures. We find that differences between the gamma and monodisperse cloud structures can be significant, depending on the surface gravity of the atmosphere. Conclusions. We present a self-consistent framework for including the effects of polydispersity for sub-stellar microphysical cloud studies using the moment method.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 17, 2025

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.

  • 7 authors
·
May 29, 2024

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 1, 2023

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 4, 2025

amerta: A Python Library for Idealized 1D Saint--Venant Dam-Break Simulation

The Saint-Venant shallow water equations (SWE) govern depth-integrated free-surface flows arising in dam-break inundation, flood routing, tsunami runup, and estuarine tidal dynamics. Closed-form analytical solutions exist only for highly idealized Riemann configurations, making rigorously verified numerical solvers essential. This work presents amerta, an open-source Python library that solves the one-dimensional frictionless Saint-Venant system on a uniform Cartesian grid using Monotone Upstream-centered Schemes for Conservation Laws (MUSCL) reconstruction with a minmod slope limiter, the Harten-Lax-van Leer-Contact (HLLC) approximate Riemann solver, and two-stage strong-stability-preserving Runge-Kutta (SSP-RK) time integration. Numba just-in-time (JIT) compilation accelerates the performance-critical kernels. The solver is verified end-to-end against the four canonical Riemann configurations: wet-bed dam break, dry-bed dam break, double rarefaction, and double shock. A six-component post-processing pipeline quantifies space-time topology, final-time error norms with empirical quantile decomposition, self-similarity collapse onto the analytical Riemann fan, integral-norm evolution, boundary-flux-corrected mass and energy diagnostics, and phase-plane analysis against analytical wave curves. The implementation conserves discrete mass to floating-point precision, satisfies discrete entropy admissibility identically, and reproduces all four analytical wave-curve geometries to within sub-centimetre accuracy in the depth-velocity phase plane. The complete source code, analytical-solution evaluators, post-processing scripts, and Network Common Data Format (NetCDF) archives are released under the MIT license.

  • 9 authors
·
May 28

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.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 5, 2023

A Multigrid Method for Efficiently Training Video Models

Training competitive deep video models is an order of magnitude slower than training their counterpart image models. Slow training causes long research cycles, which hinders progress in video understanding research. Following standard practice for training image models, video model training assumes a fixed mini-batch shape: a specific number of clips, frames, and spatial size. However, what is the optimal shape? High resolution models perform well, but train slowly. Low resolution models train faster, but they are inaccurate. Inspired by multigrid methods in numerical optimization, we propose to use variable mini-batch shapes with different spatial-temporal resolutions that are varied according to a schedule. The different shapes arise from resampling the training data on multiple sampling grids. Training is accelerated by scaling up the mini-batch size and learning rate when shrinking the other dimensions. We empirically demonstrate a general and robust grid schedule that yields a significant out-of-the-box training speedup without a loss in accuracy for different models (I3D, non-local, SlowFast), datasets (Kinetics, Something-Something, Charades), and training settings (with and without pre-training, 128 GPUs or 1 GPU). As an illustrative example, the proposed multigrid method trains a ResNet-50 SlowFast network 4.5x faster (wall-clock time, same hardware) while also improving accuracy (+0.8% absolute) on Kinetics-400 compared to the baseline training method. Code is available online.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 2, 2019

AI CFD Scientist: Toward Open-Ended Computational Fluid Dynamics Discovery with Physics-Aware AI Agents

Recent LLM-based agents have closed substantial portions of the scientific discovery loop in software-only machine-learning research, in chemistry, and in biology. Extending the same loop to high-fidelity physical simulators is harder, because solver completion does not imply physical validity and many failure modes appear only in field-level imagery rather than in solver logs. We present AI CFD Scientist, an open-source AI scientist for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) that, to our knowledge, is the first to span literature-grounded ideation, validated execution, vision-based physics verification, source-code modification, and figure-grounded writing within a single inspectable workflow. Three coupled pathways cover parameter sweeps within a fixed solver, case-local C++ library compilation for new physical models, and open-ended hypothesis search against a reference comparator, all running on OpenFOAM through Foam-Agent. At the center of the framework is a vision-language physics-verification gate that inspects rendered flow fields before any result is accepted, rerun, or written into a manuscript. On five tasks under a shared GPT-5.5 backbone, AI CFD Scientist autonomously discovers a Spalart-Allmaras runtime correction that reduces lower-wall Cf RMSE against DNS by 7.89% on the periodic hill at Reh=5600; under matched LLM cost, two strong general AI-scientist baselines (ARIS, DeepScientist) execute partial CFD workflows but lack the domain-specific validity gates needed to convert runs into defensible scientific claims; and a controlled planted-failure ablation shows that the vision-language gate detects 14 of 16 silent failures missed by solver-level checks. Code, prompts, and run artifacts are released at https://github.com/csml-rpi/cfd-scientist.

FluxNet: Learning Capacity-Constrained Local Transport Operators for Conservative and Bounded PDE Surrogates

Autoregressive learning of time-stepping operators provides an effective approach to data-driven partial differential equation (PDE) simulation, yet for conservation laws, they face a fundamental challenge: learned updates may violate global conservation over long rollouts. For the important subclass of mass-conservation-type equations, the problem is compounded by inherent physical bounds (e.g., nonnegativity or concentrations in [0,1]) whose violation further destabilizes predictions. We introduce FluxNet, which learns cumulative transport amounts representing the total conserved quantity redistributed between each cell and a configurable neighborhood over the full surrogate interval. A conservative update guarantees exact discrete conservation by construction; modular capacity-constrained transport heads (L, U, and D) enforce lower bounds, upper bounds, or near-zero dual-bound violations through architectural design. Unlike flux-rate surrogates that require temporal integration and thus inherit CFL constraints, FluxNet involves no such integration; configurable transport neighborhoods enable large-timestep prediction at full spatial resolution. Ghost cells extend the framework to non-periodic boundaries. Experiments on four benchmarks (1D convection--diffusion, 2D shallow water, 1D traffic flow, 2D Cahn--Hilliard) demonstrate exact conservation, structural bound preservation, architecture modularity, and superior stability over flux-rate surrogates at large temporal strides. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Lan-zs/FluxNet.

  • 4 authors
·
May 25

GyroSwin: 5D Surrogates for Gyrokinetic Plasma Turbulence Simulations

Nuclear fusion plays a pivotal role in the quest for reliable and sustainable energy production. A major roadblock to viable fusion power is understanding plasma turbulence, which significantly impairs plasma confinement, and is vital for next-generation reactor design. Plasma turbulence is governed by the nonlinear gyrokinetic equation, which evolves a 5D distribution function over time. Due to its high computational cost, reduced-order models are often employed in practice to approximate turbulent transport of energy. However, they omit nonlinear effects unique to the full 5D dynamics. To tackle this, we introduce GyroSwin, the first scalable 5D neural surrogate that can model 5D nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations, thereby capturing the physical phenomena neglected by reduced models, while providing accurate estimates of turbulent heat transport.GyroSwin (i) extends hierarchical Vision Transformers to 5D, (ii) introduces cross-attention and integration modules for latent 3Dleftrightarrow5D interactions between electrostatic potential fields and the distribution function, and (iii) performs channelwise mode separation inspired by nonlinear physics. We demonstrate that GyroSwin outperforms widely used reduced numerics on heat flux prediction, captures the turbulent energy cascade, and reduces the cost of fully resolved nonlinear gyrokinetics by three orders of magnitude while remaining physically verifiable. GyroSwin shows promising scaling laws, tested up to one billion parameters, paving the way for scalable neural surrogates for gyrokinetic simulations of plasma turbulence.

Operator Learning for Power Systems Simulation

Time domain simulation, i.e., modeling the system's evolution over time, is a crucial tool for studying and enhancing power system stability and dynamic performance. However, these simulations become computationally intractable for renewable-penetrated grids, due to the small simulation time step required to capture renewable energy resources' ultra-fast dynamic phenomena in the range of 1-50 microseconds. This creates a critical need for solutions that are both fast and scalable, posing a major barrier for the stable integration of renewable energy resources and thus climate change mitigation. This paper explores operator learning, a family of machine learning methods that learn mappings between functions, as a surrogate model for these costly simulations. The paper investigates, for the first time, the fundamental concept of simulation time step-invariance, which enables models trained on coarse time steps to generalize to fine-resolution dynamics. Three operator learning methods are benchmarked on a simple test system that, while not incorporating practical complexities of renewable-penetrated grids, serves as a first proof-of-concept to demonstrate the viability of time step-invariance. Models are evaluated on (i) zero-shot super-resolution, where training is performed on a coarse simulation time step and inference is performed at super-resolution, and (ii) generalization between stable and unstable dynamic regimes. This work addresses a key challenge in the integration of renewable energy for the mitigation of climate change by benchmarking operator learning methods to model physical systems.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 8, 2025

Hybrid Neural World Models

Neural surrogates promise large speedups over classical solvers for physical dynamics but fail silently at sharp dynamical events such as shocks, fronts, and contact. We present hybrid neural world models for physical dynamics: a recipe for training and deploying multi-horizon surrogates in physical state space, where a single network with continuous horizon conditioning is trained with direct supervision against textbook reference solvers to predict any future state at horizon T in one forward pass. Although no part of the training data, loss function, or architecture supervises discontinuity location, the trained surrogate encodes it implicitly, recoverable from its forward passes alone as a per-trajectory error map that concentrates on shocks, fronts, and contacts, and stays small elsewhere. The map is competitive with or better than standard label-free baselines including deep ensembles, learned error heads, gradient-magnitude indicators, and locally-adaptive conformal prediction, while using only a single trained network and requiring no calibration set or governing-equation knowledge. The recipe supports two operating points. Mode 1 runs the surrogate alone for maximum throughput, with same-hardware CPU speedups of 26x to 72x against textbook solvers on the PDE environments. Mode 2 uses the error map to gate a reference-solver fallback, deferring uncertain trajectories and roughly halving the surrogate's residual error at the default operating point. The recipe applies without modification across reaction-diffusion, compressible Euler, and rigid-body collision dynamics.

  • 2 authors
·
May 26 1

Physics-informed coherent motions to predict Lagrangian trajectories

Accurate prediction of Lagrangian trajectories in turbulent flow remains challenging due to limited temporal information in transport functions. This paper shows that surrounding coherent motions sharing the same dynamics carry enough information to provide highly probable trajectories even from sparse temporal observations. The proposed coherent predictor builds on Lagrangian coherent structures (LCSs), the advective transport barriers that govern the cohesive motion of neighbouring particles. Coherent trajectories are quantified using a local segmentation with the finite-time Lyapunov exponents (FTLE). The coherent predictor incorporates information from the particle's position history and neighbouring coherent velocity and acceleration into a novel cost function to predict its trajectory. The proposed cost function follows a physics-informed approach where the position history acts as a data fidelity term and the coherent velocity and acceleration act as physics-based regularisation constraints. We assess our proposed approach using both three-dimensional (3D) synthetic and experimental data of the wake behind a smooth cylinder and two-dimensional (2D) homogeneous isotropic turbulent (HIT) flow. The coherent predictor is deemed generic due to its consistent behaviour regardless of flow dimensions, Reynolds number, and flow topology. Our results show that the optimal cost function parameters can be modelled from the measurement uncertainties, giving lower prediction error and uncertainty than current methods. We see direct signatures of flow topology on the prediction error map, including the cylinder leading edge boundary layer, the sideward shear layers, and the vortex formation structures. These topologies are marked by high Lagrangian gradients and 3D directional motions.

  • 2 authors
·
May 5

Localized Heating and Dynamics of the Solar Corona due to a Symbiosis of Waves and Reconnection

The Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, is maintained at mega-Kelvin temperatures and fills the heliosphere with a supersonic outflowing wind. The dissipation of magnetic waves and direct electric currents are likely to be the most significant processes for heating the corona, but a lively debate exists on their relative roles. Here, we suggest that the two are often intrinsically linked, since magnetic waves may trigger current dissipation, and impulsive reconnection can launch magnetic waves. We present a study of the first of these processes by using a 2D physics-based numerical simulation using the Adaptive Mesh Refined (AMR) Versatile Advection Code (VAC). Magnetic waves such as fast magnetoacoustic waves are often observed to propagate in the large-scale corona and interact with local magnetic structures. The present numerical simulations show how the propagation of magnetic disturbances towards a null point or separator can lead to the accumulation of the electric currents. Lorentz forces can laterally push and vertically stretch the magnetic fields, forming a current sheet with a strong magnetic-field gradient. The magnetic field lines then break and reconnect, and so contribute towards coronal heating. Numerical results are presented that support these ideas and support the concept of a symbiosis between waves and reconnection in heating the solar corona.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 20, 2025

PhyMPGN: Physics-encoded Message Passing Graph Network for spatiotemporal PDE systems

Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) serves as a cornerstone for modeling complex dynamical systems. Recent progresses have demonstrated grand benefits of data-driven neural-based models for predicting spatiotemporal dynamics (e.g., tremendous speedup gain compared with classical numerical methods). However, most existing neural models rely on rich training data, have limited extrapolation and generalization abilities, and suffer to produce precise or reliable physical prediction under intricate conditions (e.g., irregular mesh or geometry, complex boundary conditions, diverse PDE parameters, etc.). To this end, we propose a new graph learning approach, namely, Physics-encoded Message Passing Graph Network (PhyMPGN), to model spatiotemporal PDE systems on irregular meshes given small training datasets. Specifically, we incorporate a GNN into a numerical integrator to approximate the temporal marching of spatiotemporal dynamics for a given PDE system. Considering that many physical phenomena are governed by diffusion processes, we further design a learnable Laplace block, which encodes the discrete Laplace-Beltrami operator, to aid and guide the GNN learning in a physically feasible solution space. A boundary condition padding strategy is also designed to improve the model convergence and accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PhyMPGN is capable of accurately predicting various types of spatiotemporal dynamics on coarse unstructured meshes, consistently achieves the state-of-the-art results, and outperforms other baselines with considerable gains.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 2, 2025

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 1, 2024

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 28, 2023

Adaptive Pruning for Increased Robustness and Reduced Computational Overhead in Gaussian Process Accelerated Saddle Point Searches

Gaussian process (GP) regression provides a strategy for accelerating saddle point searches on high-dimensional energy surfaces by reducing the number of times the energy and its derivatives with respect to atomic coordinates need to be evaluated. The computational overhead in the hyperparameter optimization can, however, be large and make the approach inefficient. Failures can also occur if the search ventures too far into regions that are not represented well enough by the GP model. Here, these challenges are resolved by using geometry-aware optimal transport measures and an active pruning strategy using a summation over Wasserstein-1 distances for each atom-type in farthest-point sampling, selecting a fixed-size subset of geometrically diverse configurations to avoid rapidly increasing cost of GP updates as more observations are made. Stability is enhanced by permutation-invariant metric that provides a reliable trust radius for early-stopping and a logarithmic barrier penalty for the growth of the signal variance. These physically motivated algorithmic changes prove their efficacy by reducing to less than a half the mean computational time on a set of 238 challenging configurations from a previously published data set of chemical reactions. With these improvements, the GP approach is established as, a robust and scalable algorithm for accelerating saddle point searches when the evaluation of the energy and atomic forces requires significant computational effort.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 7, 2025 2

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.

  • 6 authors
·
May 22, 2022

Global River Forecasting with a Topology-Informed AI Foundation Model

River systems operate as inherently interconnected continuous networks, meaning river hydrodynamic simulation ought to be a systemic process. However, widespread hydrology data scarcity often restricts data-driven forecasting to isolated predictions. To achieve systemic simulation and reduce reliance on river observations, we present GraphRiverCast (GRC), a topology-informed AI foundation model designed to simulate multivariate river hydrodynamics in global river systems. GRC is capable of operating in a "ColdStart" mode, generating predictions without relying on historical river states for initialization. In 7-day global pseudo-hindcasts, GRC-ColdStart functions as a robust standalone simulator, achieving a Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) of approximately 0.82 without exhibiting the significant error accumulation typical of autoregressive paradigms. Ablation studies reveal that topological encoding serves as indispensable structural information in the absence of historical states, explicitly guiding hydraulic connectivity and network-scale mass redistribution to reconstruct flow dynamics. Furthermore, when adapted locally via a pre-training and fine-tuning strategy, GRC consistently outperforms physics-based and locally-trained AI baselines. Crucially, this superiority extends from gauged reaches to full river networks, underscoring the necessity of topology encoding and physics-based pre-training. Built on a physics-aligned neural operator architecture, GRC enables rapid and cross-scale adaptive simulation, establishing a collaborative paradigm bridging global hydrodynamic knowledge with local hydrological reality.

  • 14 authors
·
Feb 24

Uncertainty quantification in a mechanical submodel driven by a Wasserstein-GAN

The analysis of parametric and non-parametric uncertainties of very large dynamical systems requires the construction of a stochastic model of said system. Linear approaches relying on random matrix theory and principal componant analysis can be used when systems undergo low-frequency vibrations. In the case of fast dynamics and wave propagation, we investigate a random generator of boundary conditions for fast submodels by using machine learning. We show that the use of non-linear techniques in machine learning and data-driven methods is highly relevant. Physics-informed neural networks is a possible choice for a data-driven method to replace linear modal analysis. An architecture that support a random component is necessary for the construction of the stochastic model of the physical system for non-parametric uncertainties, since the goal is to learn the underlying probabilistic distribution of uncertainty in the data. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are suited for such applications, where the Wasserstein-GAN with gradient penalty variant offers improved convergence results for our problem. The objective of our approach is to train a GAN on data from a finite element method code (Fenics) so as to extract stochastic boundary conditions for faster finite element predictions on a submodel. The submodel and the training data have both the same geometrical support. It is a zone of interest for uncertainty quantification and relevant to engineering purposes. In the exploitation phase, the framework can be viewed as a randomized and parametrized simulation generator on the submodel, which can be used as a Monte Carlo estimator.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 26, 2021

OneForecast: A Universal Framework for Global and Regional Weather Forecasting

Accurate weather forecasts are important for disaster prevention, agricultural planning, etc. Traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) methods offer physically interpretable high-accuracy predictions but are computationally expensive and fail to fully leverage rapidly growing historical data. In recent years, deep learning models have made significant progress in weather forecasting, but challenges remain, such as balancing global and regional high-resolution forecasts, excessive smoothing in extreme event predictions, and insufficient dynamic system modeling. To address these issues, this paper proposes a global-regional nested weather forecasting framework (OneForecast) based on graph neural networks. By combining a dynamic system perspective with multi-grid theory, we construct a multi-scale graph structure and densify the target region to capture local high-frequency features. We introduce an adaptive messaging mechanism, using dynamic gating units to deeply integrate node and edge features for more accurate extreme event forecasting. For high-resolution regional forecasts, we propose a neural nested grid method to mitigate boundary information loss. Experimental results show that OneForecast performs excellently across global to regional scales and short-term to long-term forecasts, especially in extreme event predictions. Codes link https://github.com/YuanGao-YG/OneForecast.

  • 14 authors
·
Feb 1, 2025

Well-Posedness of a Coupled Brinkman--Biofilm--Nutrient System with Volume-Fraction Constraints

We investigate a coupled system of partial differential equations modeling the interaction between Brinkman flow, biofilm evolution, and nutrient transport in a porous medium. The model captures the mutual influence between the fluid velocity and the biofilm through drag and diffusion coefficients that depend on the local biofilm volume fraction. A hard constraint on the admissible range of the biofilm fraction is incorporated through the subdifferential of an indicator functional, which leads naturally to an evolution variational inequality formulation for the biofilm dynamics. Assuming standard coercivity, ellipticity, and growth conditions on the model coefficients and reaction terms, we prove the global-in-time existence of weak solutions. The analysis relies on a decomposition of the system into three interconnected subproblems: the Brinkman equation with a fixed biofilm profile, the constrained biofilm evolution treated through maximal monotone operator theory, and the nutrient equation viewed as a semilinear parabolic problem. These components are then coupled through a Leray--Schauder type fixed-point argument, with the passage to the limit justified by Aubin--Lions and Simon compactness results. We further establish the nonnegativity of the nutrient concentration under a natural quasi-positivity assumption on the reaction term. Finally, we provide conditional uniqueness results for weak solutions in two spatial dimensions under additional smallness assumptions.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 30

DyMixOp: Guiding Neural Operator Design for PDEs from a Complex Dynamics Perspective with Local-Global-Mixing

A primary challenge in using neural networks to approximate nonlinear dynamical systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) is transforming these systems into a suitable format, especially when dealing with non-linearizable dynamics or the need for infinite-dimensional spaces for linearization. This paper introduces DyMixOp, a novel neural operator framework for PDEs that integrates insights from complex dynamical systems to address this challenge. Grounded in inertial manifold theory, DyMixOp transforms infinite-dimensional nonlinear PDE dynamics into a finite-dimensional latent space, establishing a structured foundation that maintains essential nonlinear interactions and enhances physical interpretability. A key innovation is the Local-Global-Mixing (LGM) transformation, inspired by convection dynamics in turbulence. This transformation effectively captures both fine-scale details and nonlinear interactions, while mitigating spectral bias commonly found in existing neural operators. The framework is further strengthened by a dynamics-informed architecture that connects multiple LGM layers to approximate linear and nonlinear dynamics, reflecting the temporal evolution of dynamical systems. Experimental results across diverse PDE benchmarks demonstrate that DyMixOp achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly reducing prediction errors, particularly in convection-dominated scenarios reaching up to 86.7\%, while maintaining computational efficiency and scalability.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 18, 2025

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/

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 30, 2022

An efficient Asymptotic-Preserving scheme for the Boltzmann mixture with disparate mass

In this paper, we develop and implement an efficient asymptotic-preserving (AP) scheme to solve the gas mixture of Boltzmann equations under the disparate mass scaling relevant to the so-called "epochal relaxation" phenomenon. The disparity in molecular masses, ranging across several orders of magnitude, leads to significant challenges in both the evaluation of collision operators and the designing of time-stepping schemes to capture the multi-scale nature of the dynamics. A direct implementation of the spectral method faces prohibitive computational costs as the mass ratio increases due to the need to resolve vastly different thermal velocities. Unlike [I. M. Gamba, S. Jin, and L. Liu, Commun. Math. Sci., 17 (2019), pp. 1257-1289], we propose an alternative approach based on proper truncation of asymptotic expansions of the collision operators, which significantly reduces the computational complexity and works well for small varepsilon. By incorporating the separation of three time scales in the model's relaxation process [P. Degond and B. Lucquin-Desreux, Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci., 6 (1996), pp. 405-436], we design an AP scheme that captures the specific dynamics of the disparate mass model while maintaining computational efficiency. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in handling large mass ratios of heavy and light species, as well as capturing the epochal relaxation phenomenon.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 20, 2024

Meta Flow Matching: Integrating Vector Fields on the Wasserstein Manifold

Numerous biological and physical processes can be modeled as systems of interacting entities evolving continuously over time, e.g. the dynamics of communicating cells or physical particles. Learning the dynamics of such systems is essential for predicting the temporal evolution of populations across novel samples and unseen environments. Flow-based models allow for learning these dynamics at the population level - they model the evolution of the entire distribution of samples. However, current flow-based models are limited to a single initial population and a set of predefined conditions which describe different dynamics. We argue that multiple processes in natural sciences have to be represented as vector fields on the Wasserstein manifold of probability densities. That is, the change of the population at any moment in time depends on the population itself due to the interactions between samples. In particular, this is crucial for personalized medicine where the development of diseases and their respective treatment response depends on the microenvironment of cells specific to each patient. We propose Meta Flow Matching (MFM), a practical approach to integrating along these vector fields on the Wasserstein manifold by amortizing the flow model over the initial populations. Namely, we embed the population of samples using a Graph Neural Network (GNN) and use these embeddings to train a Flow Matching model. This gives MFM the ability to generalize over the initial distributions unlike previously proposed methods. We demonstrate the ability of MFM to improve prediction of individual treatment responses on a large scale multi-patient single-cell drug screen dataset.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 26, 2024 2

Procedural Generation of Grain Orientations using the Wave Function Collapse Algorithm

Statistics of grain sizes and orientations in metals correlate to the material's mechanical properties. Reproducing representative volume elements for further analysis of deformation and failure in metals, like 316L stainless steel, is particularly important due to their wide use in manufacturing goods today. Two approaches, initially created for video games, were considered for the procedural generation of representative grain microstructures. The first is the Wave Function Collapse (WFC) algorithm, and the second is constraint propagation and probabilistic inference through Markov Junior, a free and open-source software. This study aimed to investigate these two algorithms' effectiveness in using reference electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) maps and recreating a statistically similar one that could be used in further research. It utilized two stainless steel EBSD maps as references to test both algorithms. First, the WFC algorithm was too constricting and, thus, incapable of producing images that resembled EBSDs. The second, MarkovJunior, was much more effective in creating a Voronoi tessellation that could be used to create an EBSD map in Python. When comparing the results between the reference and the generated EBSD, we discovered that the orientation and volume fractions were extremely similar. With the study, it was concluded that MarkovJunior is an effective machine learning tool that can reproduce representative grain microstructures.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 20, 2023

MetricGrids: Arbitrary Nonlinear Approximation with Elementary Metric Grids based Implicit Neural Representation

This paper presents MetricGrids, a novel grid-based neural representation that combines elementary metric grids in various metric spaces to approximate complex nonlinear signals. While grid-based representations are widely adopted for their efficiency and scalability, the existing feature grids with linear indexing for continuous-space points can only provide degenerate linear latent space representations, and such representations cannot be adequately compensated to represent complex nonlinear signals by the following compact decoder. To address this problem while keeping the simplicity of a regular grid structure, our approach builds upon the standard grid-based paradigm by constructing multiple elementary metric grids as high-order terms to approximate complex nonlinearities, following the Taylor expansion principle. Furthermore, we enhance model compactness with hash encoding based on different sparsities of the grids to prevent detrimental hash collisions, and a high-order extrapolation decoder to reduce explicit grid storage requirements. experimental results on both 2D and 3D reconstructions demonstrate the superior fitting and rendering accuracy of the proposed method across diverse signal types, validating its robustness and generalizability. Code is available at https://github.com/wangshu31/MetricGrids}{https://github.com/wangshu31/MetricGrids.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 12, 2025

Multi-Grid Tensorized Fourier Neural Operator for High-Resolution PDEs

Memory complexity and data scarcity have so far prohibited learning solution operators of partial differential equations (PDEs) at high resolutions. We address these limitations by introducing a new data efficient and highly parallelizable operator learning approach with reduced memory requirement and better generalization, called multi-grid tensorized neural operator (MG-TFNO). MG-TFNO scales to large resolutions by leveraging local and global structures of full-scale, real-world phenomena, through a decomposition of both the input domain and the operator's parameter space. Our contributions are threefold: i) we enable parallelization over input samples with a novel multi-grid-based domain decomposition, ii) we represent the parameters of the model in a high-order latent subspace of the Fourier domain, through a global tensor factorization, resulting in an extreme reduction in the number of parameters and improved generalization, and iii) we propose architectural improvements to the backbone FNO. Our approach can be used in any operator learning setting. We demonstrate superior performance on the turbulent Navier-Stokes equations where we achieve less than half the error with over 150x compression. The tensorization combined with the domain decomposition, yields over 150x reduction in the number of parameters and 7x reduction in the domain size without losses in accuracy, while slightly enabling parallelism.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 29, 2023