---
license: apache-2.0
tags:
  - wind-simulation
  - cfd
  - video-diffusion
  - urban-design
  - physics-informed
  - surrogate-model
---

# WinDiNet: Pretrained Video Models as Differentiable Physics Simulators for Urban Wind Flows

[![arXiv](https://img.shields.io/badge/arXiv-2603.21210-b31b1b.svg)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21210)
[![GitHub](https://img.shields.io/badge/GitHub-rbischof/windinet-blue?logo=github)](https://github.com/rbischof/windinet)
[![Web Demo](https://img.shields.io/badge/Web%20Demo-Launch-orange)](https://rbischof.github.io/windinet_web/)

**WinDiNet** repurposes a 2-billion-parameter video diffusion transformer ([LTX-Video](https://github.com/Lightricks/LTX-Video)) as a fast, differentiable surrogate for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of urban wind patterns. Fine-tuned on 10,000 CFD simulations across procedurally generated building layouts, it generates complete **112-frame wind field rollouts in under one second** — over 2,000x faster than the ground truth CFD solver.

- **Physics-informed VAE decoder**: Fine-tuned with incompressibility and wall boundary losses for physically consistent velocity field reconstruction
- **Scalar conditioning**: Fourier-feature-encoded inlet speed and domain size replace text prompts, enabling precise physical parametrisation
- **Differentiable end-to-end**: Enables gradient-based inverse design of urban building layouts for pedestrian wind comfort
- **State-of-the-art accuracy**: Outperforms specialised neural operators (FNO, OFormer, Poseidon, U-Net) on vRMSE, spectral divergence, and Wasserstein distance

## Model Weights

This repository contains three checkpoint files:

| File | Description | Parameters | Size |
|------|-------------|------------|------|
| `dit.safetensors` | Fine-tuned diffusion transformer | 1.92B | 7.7 GB |
| `scalar_embedding.safetensors` | Fourier feature scalar conditioning module | 4.3M | 17 MB |
| `vae_decoder.safetensors` | Physics-informed VAE decoder | 553M | 2.2 GB |

### Download

Checkpoints are downloaded automatically when using the windinet package. For manual download:

```bash
# Using Hugging Face CLI
huggingface-cli download rabischof/windinet --local-dir checkpoints/

# Or individual files
huggingface-cli download rabischof/windinet dit.safetensors
huggingface-cli download rabischof/windinet scalar_embedding.safetensors
huggingface-cli download rabischof/windinet vae_decoder.safetensors
```

## Installation

```bash
git clone https://github.com/rbischof/windinet.git
cd windinet
pip install -e .
```

## Inference

Each input sample is a building footprint PNG (black=building, white=fluid) paired with a JSON file specifying inlet conditions:

```json
{"inlet_speed_mps": 10.0, "field_size_m": 1400}
```

Run inference:

```bash
python scripts/inference.py configs/inference.yaml \
    --input_dir examples/footprints/ \
    --out_dir predictions/
```

Outputs per sample: `.npz` (u/v velocity fields in m/s, float16) and `.mp4` (wind magnitude video).

## Training

WinDiNet training has two stages:

**Stage 1: VAE decoder fine-tuning** with physics-informed losses (incompressibility + wall boundary conditions):

```bash
python scripts/finetune_vae.py configs/finetune_vae.yaml
```

**Stage 2: Diffusion transformer training** with scalar conditioning:

```bash
python scripts/train.py configs/windinet_scalar.yaml
```

See the [GitHub repository](https://github.com/rbischof/windinet) for dataset preparation and configuration details.

## Inverse Design

WinDiNet serves as a differentiable surrogate for gradient-based optimisation of building layouts:

```bash
python scripts/inverse_design.py configs/inverse_opt.yaml
```

The optimizer adjusts building positions to minimise a Pedestrian Wind Comfort (PWC) loss. The framework is extensible to custom objectives and building parametrisations — see `inverse/objective.py` and `inverse/footprint.py`.

## Citation

```bibtex
@article{perini2025windinet,
  title={Pretrained Video Models as Differentiable Physics Simulators for Urban Wind Flows},
  author={Perini, Janne and Bischof, Rafael and Arar, Moab and Duran, Ay{\c{c}}a and Kraus, Michael A. and Mishra, Siddhartha and Bickel, Bernd},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.21210},
  year={2026}
}
```

## Details

- **License**: Apache 2.0
- **Base model**: [LTX-Video 2B v0.9.6](https://huggingface.co/Lightricks/LTX-Video)
- **Training data**: 10,000 CFD simulations (256x256, 112 frames each)
- **arXiv**: [2603.21210](https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21210)
- **Authors**: Janne Perini\*, Rafael Bischof\*, Moab Arar, Ayca Duran, Michael A. Kraus, Siddhartha Mishra, Bernd Bickel (\* equal contribution)