Generative AI for fast and accurate Statistical Computation of Fluids

We present a generative AI algorithm for addressing the challenging task of fast, accurate and robust statistical computation of three-dimensional turbulent fluid flows. Our algorithm, termed as GenCFD, is based on a conditional score-based diffusion model. Through extensive numerical experimentation with both incompressible and compressible fluid flows, we demonstrate that GenCFD provides very accurate approximation of statistical quantities of interest such as mean, variance, point pdfs, higher-order moments, while also generating high quality realistic samples of turbulent fluid flows and ensuring excellent spectral resolution. In contrast, ensembles of operator learning baselines which are trained to minimize mean (absolute) square errors regress to the mean flow. We present rigorous theoretical results uncovering the surprising mechanisms through which diffusion models accurately generate fluid flows. These mechanisms are illustrated with solvable toy models that exhibit the relevant features of turbulent fluid flows while being amenable to explicit analytical formulas.

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.

Convolutional Neural Operators

Although very successfully used in machine learning, convolution based neural network architectures -- believed to be inconsistent in function space -- have been largely ignored in the context of learning solution operators of PDEs. Here, we adapt convolutional neural networks to demonstrate that they are indeed able to process functions as inputs and outputs. The resulting architecture, termed as convolutional neural operators (CNOs), is shown to significantly outperform competing models on benchmark experiments, paving the way for the design of an alternative robust and accurate framework for learning operators.