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Feb 12

DeepFEA: Deep Learning for Prediction of Transient Finite Element Analysis Solutions

Finite Element Analysis (FEA) is a powerful but computationally intensive method for simulating physical phenomena. Recent advancements in machine learning have led to surrogate models capable of accelerating FEA. Yet there are still limitations in developing surrogates of transient FEA models that can simultaneously predict the solutions for both nodes and elements with applicability on both the 2D and 3D domains. Motivated by this research gap, this study proposes DeepFEA, a deep learning-based framework that leverages a multilayer Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM) network branching into two parallel convolutional neural networks to predict the solutions for both nodes and elements of FEA models. The proposed network is optimized using a novel adaptive learning algorithm, called Node-Element Loss Optimization (NELO). NELO minimizes the error occurring at both branches of the network enabling the prediction of solutions for transient FEA simulations. The experimental evaluation of DeepFEA is performed on three datasets in the context of structural mechanics, generated to serve as publicly available reference datasets. The results show that DeepFEA can achieve less than 3% normalized mean and root mean squared error for 2D and 3D simulation scenarios, and inference times that are two orders of magnitude faster than FEA. In contrast, relevant state-of-the-art methods face challenges with multi-dimensional output and dynamic input prediction. Furthermore, DeepFEA's robustness was demonstrated in a real-life biomedical scenario, confirming its suitability for accurate and efficient predictions of FEA simulations.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 5, 2024

FEM-Bench: A Structured Scientific Reasoning Benchmark for Evaluating Code-Generating LLMs

As LLMs advance their reasoning capabilities about the physical world, the absence of rigorous benchmarks for evaluating their ability to generate scientifically valid physical models has become a critical gap. Computational mechanics, which develops and applies mathematical models and numerical methods to predict the behavior of physical systems under forces, deformation, and constraints, provides an ideal foundation for structured scientific reasoning evaluation. Problems follow clear mathematical structure, enforce strict physical and numerical constraints, and support objective verification. The discipline requires constructing explicit models of physical systems and reasoning about geometry, spatial relationships, and material behavior, connecting directly to emerging AI goals in physical reasoning and world modeling. We introduce FEM-Bench, a computational mechanics benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of LLMs to generate correct finite element method (FEM) and related code. FEM-Bench 2025 contains a suite of introductory but nontrivial tasks aligned with material from a first graduate course on computational mechanics. These tasks capture essential numerical and physical modeling challenges while representing only a small fraction of the complexity present in the discipline. Despite their simplicity, state-of-the-art LLMs do not reliably solve all of them. In a five attempt run, the best performing model at function writing, Gemini 3 Pro, completed 30/33 tasks at least once and 26/33 tasks all five times. The best performing model at unit test writing, GPT-5, had an Average Joint Success Rate of 73.8%. Other popular models showed broad performance variation. FEM-Bench establishes a structured foundation for evaluating AI-generated scientific code, and future iterations will incorporate increasingly sophisticated tasks to track progress as models evolve.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 23, 2025

EquiNO: A Physics-Informed Neural Operator for Multiscale Simulations

Multiscale problems are ubiquitous in physics. Numerical simulations of such problems by solving partial differential equations (PDEs) at high resolution are computationally too expensive for many-query scenarios, e.g., uncertainty quantification, remeshing applications, topology optimization, and so forth. This limitation has motivated the application of data-driven surrogate models, where the microscale computations are substituted with a surrogate, usually acting as a black-box mapping between macroscale quantities. These models offer significant speedups but struggle with incorporating microscale physical constraints, such as the balance of linear momentum and constitutive models. In this contribution, we propose Equilibrium Neural Operator (EquiNO) as a complementary physics-informed PDE surrogate for predicting microscale physics and compare it with variational physics-informed neural and operator networks. Our framework, applicable to the so-called multiscale FE^{,2}, computations, introduces the FE-OL approach by integrating the finite element (FE) method with operator learning (OL). We apply the proposed FE-OL approach to quasi-static problems of solid mechanics. The results demonstrate that FE-OL can yield accurate solutions even when confronted with a restricted dataset during model development. Our results show that EquiNO achieves speedup factors exceeding 8000-fold compared to traditional methods and offers an optimal balance between data-driven and physics-based strategies.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 27, 2025

Learning Nonlinear Responses in PET Bottle Buckling with a Hybrid DeepONet-Transolver Framework

Neural surrogates and operator networks for solving partial differential equation (PDE) problems have attracted significant research interest in recent years. However, most existing approaches are limited in their ability to generalize solutions across varying non-parametric geometric domains. In this work, we address this challenge in the context of Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) bottle buckling analysis, a representative packaging design problem conventionally solved using computationally expensive finite element analysis (FEA). We introduce a hybrid DeepONet-Transolver framework that simultaneously predicts nodal displacement fields and the time evolution of reaction forces during top load compression. Our methodology is evaluated on two families of bottle geometries parameterized by two and four design variables. Training data is generated using nonlinear FEA simulations in Abaqus for 254 unique designs per family. The proposed framework achieves mean relative L^{2} errors of 2.5-13% for displacement fields and approximately 2.4% for time-dependent reaction forces for the four-parameter bottle family. Point-wise error analyses further show absolute displacement errors on the order of 10^{-4}-10^{-3}, with the largest discrepancies confined to localized geometric regions. Importantly, the model accurately captures key physical phenomena, such as buckling behavior, across diverse bottle geometries. These results highlight the potential of our framework as a scalable and computationally efficient surrogate, particularly for multi-task predictions in computational mechanics and applications requiring rapid design evaluation.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 16, 2025

A Nonintrusive Distributed Reduced Order Modeling Framework for nonlinear structural mechanics -- application to elastoviscoplastic computations

In this work, we propose a framework that constructs reduced order models for nonlinear structural mechanics in a nonintrusive fashion, and can handle large scale simulations. We identify three steps that are carried out separately in time, and possibly on different devices: (i) the production of high-fidelity solutions by a commercial software, (ii) the offline stage of the model reduction and (iii) the online stage where the reduced order model is exploited. The nonintrusivity assumes that only the displacement field solution is known, and relies on operations on simulation data during the offline phase by using an in-house code. The compatibility with a new commercial code only needs the implementation of a routine converting the mesh and result format into our in-house data format. The nonintrusive capabilities of the framework are demonstrated on numerical experiments using commercial versions of the finite element softwares Zset and Ansys Mechanical. The nonlinear constitutive equations are evaluated by using the same external plugins as for Zset or Ansys Mechanical. The large scale simulations are handled using domain decomposition and parallel computing with distributed memory. The features and performances of the framework are evaluated on two numerical applications involving elastoviscoplastic materials: the second one involves a model of high-pressure blade, where the framework is used to extrapolate cyclic loadings in 6.5 hours, whereas the reference high-fidelity computation would take 9.5 days.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 18, 2018

Reduced-Order Neural Operators: Learning Lagrangian Dynamics on Highly Sparse Graphs

We present a neural operator architecture to simulate Lagrangian dynamics, such as fluid flow, granular flows, and elastoplasticity. Traditional numerical methods, such as the finite element method (FEM), suffer from long run times and large memory consumption. On the other hand, approaches based on graph neural networks are faster but still suffer from long computation times on dense graphs, which are often required for high-fidelity simulations. Our model, GIOROM or Graph Interaction Operator for Reduced-Order Modeling, learns temporal dynamics within a reduced-order setting, capturing spatial features from a highly sparse graph representation of the input and generalizing to arbitrary spatial locations during inference. The model is geometry-aware and discretization-agnostic and can generalize to different initial conditions, velocities, and geometries after training. We show that point clouds of the order of 100,000 points can be inferred from sparse graphs with sim1000 points, with negligible change in computation time. We empirically evaluate our model on elastic solids, Newtonian fluids, Non-Newtonian fluids, Drucker-Prager granular flows, and von Mises elastoplasticity. On these benchmarks, our approach results in a 25times speedup compared to other neural network-based physics simulators while delivering high-fidelity predictions of complex physical systems and showing better performance on most benchmarks. The code and the demos are provided at https://github.com/HrishikeshVish/GIOROM.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 4, 2024

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

An error indicator-based adaptive reduced order model for nonlinear structural mechanics -- application to high-pressure turbine blades

The industrial application motivating this work is the fatigue computation of aircraft engines' high-pressure turbine blades. The material model involves nonlinear elastoviscoplastic behavior laws, for which the parameters depend on the temperature. For this application, the temperature loading is not accurately known and can reach values relatively close to the creep temperature: important nonlinear effects occur and the solution strongly depends on the used thermal loading. We consider a nonlinear reduced order model able to compute, in the exploitation phase, the behavior of the blade for a new temperature field loading. The sensitivity of the solution to the temperature makes {the classical unenriched proper orthogonal decomposition method} fail. In this work, we propose a new error indicator, quantifying the error made by the reduced order model in computational complexity independent of the size of the high-fidelity reference model. In our framework, when the {error indicator} becomes larger than a given tolerance, the reduced order model is updated using one time step solution of the high-fidelity reference model. The approach is illustrated on a series of academic test cases and applied on a setting of industrial complexity involving 5 million degrees of freedom, where the whole procedure is computed in parallel with distributed memory.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 19, 2019

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 Graph-Transformer Operator for Learning Physical Dynamics with Manifolds Embedding

Accurate and efficient physical simulations are essential in science and engineering, yet traditional numerical solvers face significant challenges in computational cost when handling simulations across dynamic scenarios involving complex geometries, varying boundary/initial conditions, and diverse physical parameters. While deep learning offers promising alternatives, existing methods often struggle with flexibility and generalization, particularly on unstructured meshes, which significantly limits their practical applicability. To address these challenges, we propose PhysGTO, an efficient Graph-Transformer Operator for learning physical dynamics through explicit manifold embeddings in both physical and latent spaces. In the physical space, the proposed Unified Graph Embedding module aligns node-level conditions and constructs sparse yet structure-preserving graph connectivity to process heterogeneous inputs. In the latent space, PhysGTO integrates a lightweight flux-oriented message-passing scheme with projection-inspired attention to capture local and global dependencies, facilitating multilevel interactions among complex physical correlations. This design ensures linear complexity relative to the number of mesh points, reducing both the number of trainable parameters and computational costs in terms of floating-point operations (FLOPs), and thereby allowing efficient inference in real-time applications. We introduce a comprehensive benchmark spanning eleven datasets, covering problems with unstructured meshes, transient flow dynamics, and large-scale 3D geometries. PhysGTO consistently achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while significantly reducing computational costs, demonstrating superior flexibility, scalability, and generalization in a wide range of simulation tasks.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 10, 2025 1

High-order finite element method for atomic structure calculations

We introduce featom, an open source code that implements a high-order finite element solver for the radial Schr\"odinger, Dirac, and Kohn-Sham equations. The formulation accommodates various mesh types, such as uniform or exponential, and the convergence can be systematically controlled by increasing the number and/or polynomial order of the finite element basis functions. The Dirac equation is solved using a squared Hamiltonian approach to eliminate spurious states. To address the slow convergence of the kappa=pm1 states due to divergent derivatives at the origin, we incorporate known asymptotic forms into the solutions. We achieve a high level of accuracy (10^{-8} Hartree) for total energies and eigenvalues of heavy atoms such as uranium in both Schr\"odinger and Dirac Kohn-Sham solutions. We provide detailed convergence studies and computational parameters required to attain commonly required accuracies. Finally, we compare our results with known analytic results as well as the results of other methods. In particular, we calculate benchmark results for atomic numbers (Z) from 1 to 92, verifying current benchmarks. We demonstrate significant speedup compared to the state-of-the-art shooting solver dftatom. An efficient, modular Fortran 2008 implementation, is provided under an open source, permissive license, including examples and tests, wherein particular emphasis is placed on the independence (no global variables), reusability, and generality of the individual routines.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 11, 2023

Learning to Predict Structural Vibrations

In mechanical structures like airplanes, cars and houses, noise is generated and transmitted through vibrations. To take measures to reduce this noise, vibrations need to be simulated with expensive numerical computations. Deep learning surrogate models present a promising alternative to classical numerical simulations as they can be evaluated magnitudes faster, while trading-off accuracy. To quantify such trade-offs systematically and foster the development of methods, we present a benchmark on the task of predicting the vibration of harmonically excited plates. The benchmark features a total of 12,000 plate geometries with varying forms of beadings, material, boundary conditions, load position and sizes with associated numerical solutions. To address the benchmark task, we propose a new network architecture, named Frequency-Query Operator, which predicts vibration patterns of plate geometries given a specific excitation frequency. Applying principles from operator learning and implicit models for shape encoding, our approach effectively addresses the prediction of highly variable frequency response functions occurring in dynamic systems. To quantify the prediction quality, we introduce a set of evaluation metrics and evaluate the method on our vibrating-plates benchmark. Our method outperforms DeepONets, Fourier Neural Operators and more traditional neural network architectures and can be used for design optimization. Code, dataset and visualizations: https://github.com/ecker-lab/Learning_Vibrating_Plates

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 9, 2023

Learning Flexible Body Collision Dynamics with Hierarchical Contact Mesh Transformer

Recently, many mesh-based graph neural network (GNN) models have been proposed for modeling complex high-dimensional physical systems. Remarkable achievements have been made in significantly reducing the solving time compared to traditional numerical solvers. These methods are typically designed to i) reduce the computational cost in solving physical dynamics and/or ii) propose techniques to enhance the solution accuracy in fluid and rigid body dynamics. However, it remains under-explored whether they are effective in addressing the challenges of flexible body dynamics, where instantaneous collisions occur within a very short timeframe. In this paper, we present Hierarchical Contact Mesh Transformer (HCMT), which uses hierarchical mesh structures and can learn long-range dependencies (occurred by collisions) among spatially distant positions of a body -- two close positions in a higher-level mesh correspond to two distant positions in a lower-level mesh. HCMT enables long-range interactions, and the hierarchical mesh structure quickly propagates collision effects to faraway positions. To this end, it consists of a contact mesh Transformer and a hierarchical mesh Transformer (CMT and HMT, respectively). Lastly, we propose a flexible body dynamics dataset, consisting of trajectories that reflect experimental settings frequently used in the display industry for product designs. We also compare the performance of several baselines using well-known benchmark datasets. Our results show that HCMT provides significant performance improvements over existing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/yuyudeep/hcmt.

  • 12 authors
·
Dec 19, 2023

A priori compression of convolutional neural networks for wave simulators

Convolutional neural networks are now seeing widespread use in a variety of fields, including image classification, facial and object recognition, medical imaging analysis, and many more. In addition, there are applications such as physics-informed simulators in which accurate forecasts in real time with a minimal lag are required. The present neural network designs include millions of parameters, which makes it difficult to install such complex models on devices that have limited memory. Compression techniques might be able to resolve these issues by decreasing the size of CNN models that are created by reducing the number of parameters that contribute to the complexity of the models. We propose a compressed tensor format of convolutional layer, a priori, before the training of the neural network. 3-way kernels or 2-way kernels in convolutional layers are replaced by one-way fiters. The overfitting phenomena will be reduced also. The time needed to make predictions or time required for training using the original Convolutional Neural Networks model would be cut significantly if there were fewer parameters to deal with. In this paper we present a method of a priori compressing convolutional neural networks for finite element (FE) predictions of physical data. Afterwards we validate our a priori compressed models on physical data from a FE model solving a 2D wave equation. We show that the proposed convolutinal compression technique achieves equivalent performance as classical convolutional layers with fewer trainable parameters and lower memory footprint.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 11, 2023

Dynamic Modeling and Vibration Analysis of Large Deployable Mesh Reflectors

Large deployable mesh reflectors are essential for space applications, providing precise reflecting surfaces for high-gain antennas used in satellite communications, Earth observation, and deep-space missions. During on-orbit missions, active shape adjustment and attitude control are crucial for maintaining surface accuracy and proper orientation for these reflectors, ensuring optimal performance. Preventing resonance through thorough dynamic modeling and vibration analysis is vital to avoid structural damage and ensure stability and reliability. Existing dynamic modeling approaches, such as wave and finite element methods, often fail to accurately predict dynamic responses due to the limited capability of handling three-dimensional reflectors or the oversimplification of cable members of a reflector. This paper proposes the Cartesian spatial discretization method for dynamic modeling and vibration analysis of cable-network structures in large deployable mesh reflectors. This method defines cable member positions as a summation of internal and boundary-induced terms within a global Cartesian coordinate system. Numerical simulation on a two-dimensional cable-network structure and a center-feed mesh reflector demonstrates the superiority of the proposed method over traditional approaches, highlighting its accuracy and versatility, and establishing it as a robust tool for analyzing three-dimensional complex reflector configurations.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 23, 2024

Solving Navier-Stokes Equations Using Data-free Physics-Informed Neural Networks With Hard Boundary Conditions

In recent years, Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have emerged as a powerful and robust framework for solving nonlinear differential equations across a wide range of scientific and engineering disciplines, including biology, geophysics, astrophysics and fluid dynamics. In the PINN framework, the governing partial differential equations, along with initial and boundary conditions, are encoded directly into the loss function, enabling the network to learn solutions that are consistent with the underlying physics. In this work, we employ the PINN framework to solve the dimensionless Navier-Stokes equations for three two-dimensional incompressible, steady, laminar flow problems without using any labeled data. The boundary and initial conditions are enforced in a hard manner, ensuring they are satisfied exactly rather than penalized during training. We validate the PINN predicted velocity profiles, drag coefficients and pressure profiles against the conventional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations for moderate to high values of Reynolds number (Re). It is observed that the PINN predictions show good agreement with the CFD results at lower Re. We also extend our analysis to a transient condition and find that our method is equally capable of simulating complex time-dependent flow dynamics. To quantitatively assess the accuracy, we compute the L_2 normalized error, which lies in the range O(10^{-4}) - O(10^{-1}) for our chosen case studies.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 18, 2025

Towards scalable surrogate models based on Neural Fields for large scale aerodynamic simulations

This paper introduces a novel surrogate modeling framework for aerodynamic applications based on Neural Fields. The proposed approach, MARIO (Modulated Aerodynamic Resolution Invariant Operator), addresses non parametric geometric variability through an efficient shape encoding mechanism and exploits the discretization-invariant nature of Neural Fields. It enables training on significantly downsampled meshes, while maintaining consistent accuracy during full-resolution inference. These properties allow for efficient modeling of diverse flow conditions, while reducing computational cost and memory requirements compared to traditional CFD solvers and existing surrogate methods. The framework is validated on two complementary datasets that reflect industrial constraints. First, the AirfRANS dataset consists in a two-dimensional airfoil benchmark with non-parametric shape variations. Performance evaluation of MARIO on this case demonstrates an order of magnitude improvement in prediction accuracy over existing methods across velocity, pressure, and turbulent viscosity fields, while accurately capturing boundary layer phenomena and aerodynamic coefficients. Second, the NASA Common Research Model features three-dimensional pressure distributions on a full aircraft surface mesh, with parametric control surface deflections. This configuration confirms MARIO's accuracy and scalability. Benchmarking against state-of-the-art methods demonstrates that Neural Field surrogates can provide rapid and accurate aerodynamic predictions under the computational and data limitations characteristic of industrial applications.

  • 6 authors
·
May 14, 2025

MultiLevel Variational MultiScale (ML-VMS) framework for large-scale simulation

In this paper, we propose the MultiLevel Variational MultiScale (ML-VMS) method, a novel approach that seamlessly integrates a multilevel mesh strategy into the Variational Multiscale (VMS) framework. A key feature of the ML-VMS method is the use of the Convolutional Hierarchical Deep Neural Network (C-HiDeNN) as the approximation basis. The framework employs a coarse mesh throughout the domain, with localized fine meshes placed only in subdomains of high interest, such as those surrounding a source. Solutions at different resolutions are robustly coupled through the variational weak form and interface conditions. Compared to existing multilevel methods, ML-VMS (1) can couple an arbitrary number of mesh levels across different scales using variational multiscale framework; (2) allows approximating functions with arbitrary orders with linear finite element mesh due to the C-HiDeNN basis; (3) is supported by a rigorous theoretical error analysis; (4) features several tunable hyperparameters (e.g., order p, patch size s) with a systematic guide for their selection. We first show the theoretical error estimates of ML-VMS. Then through numerical examples, we demonstrate that ML-VMS with the C-HiDeNN takes less computational time than the FEM basis given comparable accuracy. Furthermore, we incorporate a space-time reduced-order model (ROM) based on C-HiDeNN-Tensor Decomposition (TD) into the ML-VMS framework. For a large-scale single-track laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) transient heat transfer problem that is equivalent to a full-order finite element model with 10^{10} spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs), our 3-level ML-VMS C-HiDeNN-TD achieves an approximately 5,000x speedup on a single CPU over a single-level linear FEM-TD ROM.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 27, 2025

TOMATOES: Topology and Material Optimization for Latent Heat Thermal Energy Storage Devices

Latent heat thermal energy storage (LHTES) systems are compelling candidates for energy storage, primarily owing to their high storage density. Improving their performance is crucial for developing the next-generation efficient and cost effective devices. Topology optimization (TO) has emerged as a powerful computational tool to design LHTES systems by optimally distributing a high-conductivity material (HCM) and a phase change material (PCM). However, conventional TO typically limits to optimizing the geometry for a fixed, pre-selected materials. This approach does not leverage the large and expanding databases of novel materials. Consequently, the co-design of material and geometry for LHTES remains a challenge and unexplored. To address this limitation, we present an automated design framework for the concurrent optimization of material choice and topology. A key challenge is the discrete nature of material selection, which is incompatible with the gradient-based methods used for TO. We overcome this by using a data-driven variational autoencoder (VAE) to project discrete material databases for both the HCM and PCM onto continuous and differentiable latent spaces. These continuous material representations are integrated into an end-to-end differentiable, transient nonlinear finite-element solver that accounts for phase change. We demonstrate this framework on a problem aimed at maximizing the discharged energy within a specified time, subject to cost constraints. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through several illustrative examples.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 8, 2025

Learning Neural Constitutive Laws From Motion Observations for Generalizable PDE Dynamics

We propose a hybrid neural network (NN) and PDE approach for learning generalizable PDE dynamics from motion observations. Many NN approaches learn an end-to-end model that implicitly models both the governing PDE and constitutive models (or material models). Without explicit PDE knowledge, these approaches cannot guarantee physical correctness and have limited generalizability. We argue that the governing PDEs are often well-known and should be explicitly enforced rather than learned. Instead, constitutive models are particularly suitable for learning due to their data-fitting nature. To this end, we introduce a new framework termed "Neural Constitutive Laws" (NCLaw), which utilizes a network architecture that strictly guarantees standard constitutive priors, including rotation equivariance and undeformed state equilibrium. We embed this network inside a differentiable simulation and train the model by minimizing a loss function based on the difference between the simulation and the motion observation. We validate NCLaw on various large-deformation dynamical systems, ranging from solids to fluids. After training on a single motion trajectory, our method generalizes to new geometries, initial/boundary conditions, temporal ranges, and even multi-physics systems. On these extremely out-of-distribution generalization tasks, NCLaw is orders-of-magnitude more accurate than previous NN approaches. Real-world experiments demonstrate our method's ability to learn constitutive laws from videos.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 27, 2023

Toward smart composites: small-scale, untethered prediction and control for soft sensor/actuator systems

We present formulation and open-source tools to achieve in-material model predictive control of sensor/actuator systems using learned forward kinematics and on-device computation. Microcontroller units (MCUs) that compute the prediction and control task while colocated with the sensors and actuators enable in-material untethered behaviors. In this approach, small parameter size neural network models learn forward kinematics offline. Our open-source compiler, nn4mc, generates code to offload these predictions onto MCUs. A Newton-Raphson solver then computes the control input in real time. We first benchmark this nonlinear control approach against a PID controller on a mass-spring-damper simulation. We then study experimental results on two experimental rigs with different sensing, actuation and computational hardware: a tendon-based platform with embedded LightLace sensors and a HASEL-based platform with magnetic sensors. Experimental results indicate effective high-bandwidth tracking of reference paths (greater than or equal to 120 Hz) with a small memory footprint (less than or equal to 6.4% of flash memory). The measured path following error does not exceed 2mm in the tendon-based platform. The simulated path following error does not exceed 1mm in the HASEL-based platform. The mean power consumption of this approach in an ARM Cortex-M4f device is 45.4 mW. This control approach is also compatible with Tensorflow Lite models and equivalent on-device code. In-material intelligence enables a new class of composites that infuse autonomy into structures and systems with refined artificial proprioception.

  • 7 authors
·
May 22, 2022

Determining large-strain metal plasticity parameters using in-situ measurements of plastic flow past a wedge

We present a novel approach to determine the constitutive properties of metals under large plastic strains and strain rates that otherwise are difficult to access using conventional materials testing methods. The approach exploits large-strain plastic flow past a sharp wedge, coupled with high-speed photography and image velocimetry to capture the underlying plastic flow dynamics. The inverse problem of estimating material parameters from the flow field is solved using an iterative optimization procedure that minimizes the gap between internal and external plastic work. A major advantage of the method is that it neither makes any assumptions about the flow nor requires computational simulations. To counter the problem of non-unique parameter estimates, we propose a parameterization scheme that takes advantage of the functional form of the constitutive model and reformulates the problem into a more tractable form to identify plasticity parameters uniquely. We present studies to illustrate the principle of the method with two materials with widely different plastic flow characteristics: copper (strain hardening) and a lead-free solder alloy (rate sensitive and deformation history dependent). The results demonstrate the efficacy of the method in reliably determining the material parameters under high strain/strain rate conditions of relevance to a range of practical engineering problems.

  • 4 authors
·
May 28, 2022

PDEBENCH: An Extensive Benchmark for Scientific Machine Learning

Machine learning-based modeling of physical systems has experienced increased interest in recent years. Despite some impressive progress, there is still a lack of benchmarks for Scientific ML that are easy to use but still challenging and representative of a wide range of problems. We introduce PDEBench, a benchmark suite of time-dependent simulation tasks based on Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). PDEBench comprises both code and data to benchmark the performance of novel machine learning models against both classical numerical simulations and machine learning baselines. Our proposed set of benchmark problems contribute the following unique features: (1) A much wider range of PDEs compared to existing benchmarks, ranging from relatively common examples to more realistic and difficult problems; (2) much larger ready-to-use datasets compared to prior work, comprising multiple simulation runs across a larger number of initial and boundary conditions and PDE parameters; (3) more extensible source codes with user-friendly APIs for data generation and baseline results with popular machine learning models (FNO, U-Net, PINN, Gradient-Based Inverse Method). PDEBench allows researchers to extend the benchmark freely for their own purposes using a standardized API and to compare the performance of new models to existing baseline methods. We also propose new evaluation metrics with the aim to provide a more holistic understanding of learning methods in the context of Scientific ML. With those metrics we identify tasks which are challenging for recent ML methods and propose these tasks as future challenges for the community. The code is available at https://github.com/pdebench/PDEBench.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 13, 2022

EngiBench: A Framework for Data-Driven Engineering Design Research

Engineering design optimization seeks to automatically determine the shapes, topologies, or parameters of components that maximize performance under given conditions. This process often depends on physics-based simulations, which are difficult to install, computationally expensive, and require domain-specific expertise. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce EngiBench, the first open-source library and datasets spanning diverse domains for data-driven engineering design. EngiBench provides a unified API and a curated set of benchmarks -- covering aeronautics, heat conduction, photonics, and more -- that enable fair, reproducible comparisons of optimization and machine learning algorithms, such as generative or surrogate models. We also release EngiOpt, a companion library offering a collection of such algorithms compatible with the EngiBench interface. Both libraries are modular, letting users plug in novel algorithms or problems, automate end-to-end experiment workflows, and leverage built-in utilities for visualization, dataset generation, feasibility checks, and performance analysis. We demonstrate their versatility through experiments comparing state-of-the-art techniques across multiple engineering design problems, an undertaking that was previously prohibitively time-consuming to perform. Finally, we show that these problems pose significant challenges for standard machine learning methods due to highly sensitive and constrained design manifolds.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 2, 2025 1

Integrating Large Language Models for Automated Structural Analysis

Automated analysis for engineering structures offers considerable potential for boosting efficiency by minimizing repetitive tasks. Although AI-driven methods are increasingly common, no systematic framework yet leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for automatic structural analysis. To address this gap, we propose a novel framework that integrates LLMs with structural analysis software. LLMs serve as the core engine: they parse structural descriptions from text and translate them into executable Python scripts. Moreover, the framework integrates the generative capabilities of LLMs with code-based finite element (FE) tools like OpenSeesPy. It employs domain-specific prompt design and in-context learning strategies to enhance the LLM's problem-solving capabilities and generative stability, enabling fully automated structural analysis from descriptive text to model outputs. In our experiments, we introduce a well-curated small-scale benchmark dataset of 20 structural analysis word problems (SAWPs) with ground-truth solutions and evaluate the performance of different LLMs within our framework in solving these SAWPs. The role of system instructions, crafted by structural engineers, is also investigated to understand their impact on LLM-driven structural analysis. Additionally, the generative stability of our framework is examined. Through multiple validation experiments on the benchmark, our results demonstrate that the proposed framework can substantially increase the level of automation in solving SAWPs compared to traditional methods. Quantitatively, the framework, built on GPT-4o, achieved 100% accuracy, surpassing GPT-4 (85%), Gemini 1.5 Pro (80%), and Llama-3.3 (30%) on the test examples. Furthermore, integrating domain-specific instructions enhanced performance by 30% on problems with asymmetrical structural configurations.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 13, 2025

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

amangkurat: A Python Library for Symplectic Pseudo-Spectral Solution of the Idealized (1+1)D Nonlinear Klein-Gordon Equation

This study introduces amangkurat, an open-source Python library designed for the robust numerical simulation of relativistic scalar field dynamics governed by the nonlinear Klein-Gordon equation in (1+1)D spacetime. The software implements a hybrid computational strategy that couples Fourier pseudo-spectral spatial discretization with a symplectic Størmer-Verlet temporal integrator, ensuring both exponential spatial convergence for smooth solutions and long-term preservation of Hamiltonian structure. To optimize performance, the solver incorporates adaptive timestepping based on Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy (CFL) stability criteria and utilizes Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation for parallelized force computation. The library's capabilities are validated across four canonical physical regimes: dispersive linear wave propagation, static topological kink preservation in phi-fourth theory, integrable breather dynamics in the sine-Gordon model, and non-integrable kink-antikink collisions. Beyond standard numerical validation, this work establishes a multi-faceted analysis framework employing information-theoretic entropy metrics (Shannon, Rényi, and Tsallis), kernel density estimation, and phase space reconstruction to quantify the distinct phenomenological signatures of these regimes. Statistical hypothesis testing confirms that these scenarios represent statistically distinguishable dynamical populations. Benchmarks on standard workstation hardware demonstrate that the implementation achieves high computational efficiency, making it a viable platform for exploratory research and education in nonlinear field theory.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 27, 2025

Geometry aware inference of steady state PDEs using Equivariant Neural Fields representations

Recent advances in Neural Fields have enabled powerful, discretization-invariant methods for learning neural operators that approximate solutions of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) on general geometries. Building on these developments, we introduce enf2enf, an encoder--decoder methodology for predicting steady-state Partial Differential Equations with non-parameterized geometric variability, based on recently proposed Equivariant Neural Field architectures. In enf2enf, input geometries are encoded into latent point cloud embeddings that inherently preserve geometric grounding and capture local phenomena. The resulting representations are then combined with global parameters and directly decoded into continuous output fields, thus efficiently modeling the coupling between geometry and physics. By leveraging the inductive biases of locality and translation invariance, our approach is able to capture fine-scale physical features as well as complex shape variations, thereby enhancing generalization and physical compliance. Extensive experiments on a high-fidelity aerodynamic dataset, a hyper-elastic material benchmark, and multi-element airfoil geometries, demonstrate that the proposed model achieves superior or competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art graph based, operator learning, and neural field methods. Notably, our method supports real time inference and zero-shot super-resolution, enabling efficient training on low-resolution meshes while maintaining high accuracy on full-scale discretizations.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 24, 2025

Automating modeling in mechanics: LLMs as designers of physics-constrained neural networks for constitutive modeling of materials

Large language model (LLM)-based agentic frameworks increasingly adopt the paradigm of dynamically generating task-specific agents. We suggest that not only agents but also specialized software modules for scientific and engineering tasks can be generated on demand. We demonstrate this concept in the field of solid mechanics. There, so-called constitutive models are required to describe the relationship between mechanical stress and body deformation. Constitutive models are essential for both the scientific understanding and industrial application of materials. However, even recent data-driven methods of constitutive modeling, such as constitutive artificial neural networks (CANNs), still require substantial expert knowledge and human labor. We present a framework in which an LLM generates a CANN on demand, tailored to a given material class and dataset provided by the user. The framework covers LLM-based architecture selection, integration of physical constraints, and complete code generation. Evaluation on three benchmark problems demonstrates that LLM-generated CANNs achieve accuracy comparable to or greater than manually engineered counterparts, while also exhibiting reliable generalization to unseen loading scenarios and extrapolation to large deformations. These findings indicate that LLM-based generation of physics-constrained neural networks can substantially reduce the expertise required for constitutive modeling and represent a step toward practical end-to-end automation.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 1, 2025

MechAgents: Large language model multi-agent collaborations can solve mechanics problems, generate new data, and integrate knowledge

Solving mechanics problems using numerical methods requires comprehensive intelligent capability of retrieving relevant knowledge and theory, constructing and executing codes, analyzing the results, a task that has thus far mainly been reserved for humans. While emerging AI methods can provide effective approaches to solve end-to-end problems, for instance via the use of deep surrogate models or various data analytics strategies, they often lack physical intuition since knowledge is baked into the parametric complement through training, offering less flexibility when it comes to incorporating mathematical or physical insights. By leveraging diverse capabilities of multiple dynamically interacting large language models (LLMs), we can overcome the limitations of conventional approaches and develop a new class of physics-inspired generative machine learning platform, here referred to as MechAgents. A set of AI agents can solve mechanics tasks, here demonstrated for elasticity problems, via autonomous collaborations. A two-agent team can effectively write, execute and self-correct code, in order to apply finite element methods to solve classical elasticity problems in various flavors (different boundary conditions, domain geometries, meshes, small/finite deformation and linear/hyper-elastic constitutive laws, and others). For more complex tasks, we construct a larger group of agents with enhanced division of labor among planning, formulating, coding, executing and criticizing the process and results. The agents mutually correct each other to improve the overall team-work performance in understanding, formulating and validating the solution. Our framework shows the potential of synergizing the intelligence of language models, the reliability of physics-based modeling, and the dynamic collaborations among diverse agents, opening novel avenues for automation of solving engineering problems.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 14, 2023

Physics-informed Reduced Order Modeling of Time-dependent PDEs via Differentiable Solvers

Reduced-order modeling (ROM) of time-dependent and parameterized differential equations aims to accelerate the simulation of complex high-dimensional systems by learning a compact latent manifold representation that captures the characteristics of the solution fields and their time-dependent dynamics. Although high-fidelity numerical solvers generate the training datasets, they have thus far been excluded from the training process, causing the learned latent dynamics to drift away from the discretized governing physics. This mismatch often limits generalization and forecasting capabilities. In this work, we propose Physics-informed ROM (Φ-ROM) by incorporating differentiable PDE solvers into the training procedure. Specifically, the latent space dynamics and its dependence on PDE parameters are shaped directly by the governing physics encoded in the solver, ensuring a strong correspondence between the full and reduced systems. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art data-driven ROMs and other physics-informed strategies by accurately generalizing to new dynamics arising from unseen parameters, enabling long-term forecasting beyond the training horizon, maintaining continuity in both time and space, and reducing the data cost. Furthermore, Φ-ROM learns to recover and forecast the solution fields even when trained or evaluated with sparse and irregular observations of the fields, providing a flexible framework for field reconstruction and data assimilation. We demonstrate the framework's robustness across various PDE solvers and highlight its broad applicability by providing an open-source JAX implementation that is readily extensible to other PDE systems and differentiable solvers, available at https://phi-rom.github.io.

  • 4 authors
·
May 20, 2025

DyFraNet: Forecasting and Backcasting Dynamic Fracture Mechanics in Space and Time Using a 2D-to-3D Deep Neural Network

The dynamics of materials failure is one of the most critical phenomena in a range of scientific and engineering fields, from healthcare to structural materials to transportation. In this paper we propose a specially designed deep neural network, DyFraNet, which can predict dynamic fracture behaviors by identifying a complete history of fracture propagation - from cracking onset, as a crack grows through the material, modeled as a series of frames evolving over time and dependent on each other. Furthermore, this model can not only forecast future fracture processes but also backcast to elucidate the past fracture history. In this scenario, once provided with the outcome of a fracture event, the model will elucidate past events that led to this state and will predict the future evolution of the failure process. By comparing the predicted results with atomistic-level simulations and theory, we show that DyFraNet can capture dynamic fracture mechanics by accurately predicting how cracks develop over time, including measures such as the crack speed, as well as when cracks become unstable. We use GradCAM to interpret how DyFraNet perceives the relationship between geometric conditions and fracture dynamics and we find DyFraNet pays special attention to the areas around crack tips, which have a critical influence in the early stage of fracture propagation. In later stages, the model pays increased attention to the existing or newly formed damage distribution in the material. The proposed approach offers significant potential to accelerate the exploration of the dynamics in material design against fracture failures and can be beneficially adapted for all kinds of dynamical engineering problems.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 15, 2022

MeLM, a generative pretrained language modeling framework that solves forward and inverse mechanics problems

We report a flexible multi-modal mechanics language model, MeLM, applied to solve various nonlinear forward and inverse problems, that can deal with a set of instructions, numbers and microstructure data. The framework is applied to various examples including bio-inspired hierarchical honeycomb design, carbon nanotube mechanics, and protein unfolding. In spite of the flexible nature of the model-which allows us to easily incorporate diverse materials, scales, and mechanical features-it performs well across disparate forward and inverse tasks. Based on an autoregressive attention-model, MeLM effectively represents a large multi-particle system consisting of hundreds of millions of neurons, where the interaction potentials are discovered through graph-forming self-attention mechanisms that are then used to identify relationships from emergent structures, while taking advantage of synergies discovered in the training data. We show that the model can solve complex degenerate mechanics design problems and determine novel material architectures across a range of hierarchical levels, providing an avenue for materials discovery and analysis. Looking beyond the demonstrations reported in this paper, we discuss other opportunities in applied mechanics and general considerations about the use of large language models in modeling, design, and analysis that can span a broad spectrum of material properties from mechanical, thermal, optical, to electronic.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 30, 2023

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

AB-UPT: Scaling Neural CFD Surrogates for High-Fidelity Automotive Aerodynamics Simulations via Anchored-Branched Universal Physics Transformers

Recent advances in neural surrogate modeling offer the potential for transformative innovations in applications such as automotive aerodynamics. Yet, industrial-scale problems often involve volumetric meshes with cell counts reaching the 100 millions, presenting major scalability challenges. Complex geometries further complicate modeling through intricate surface-volume interactions, while quantities such as vorticity are highly nonlinear and must satisfy strict divergence-free constraints. To address these requirements, we introduce AB-UPT as a novel modeling scheme for building neural surrogates for CFD simulations. AB-UPT is designed to: (i) decouple geometry encoding and prediction tasks via multi-branch operators; (ii) enable scalability to high-resolution outputs via neural simulation in a low-dimensional latent space, coupled with anchored neural field decoders to predict high-fidelity outputs; (iii) enforce physics consistency by a novel divergence-free formulation. We show that AB-UPT yields state-of-the-art predictive accuracy of surface and volume fields on automotive CFD simulations ranging from 33 thousand up to 150 million mesh cells. Furthermore, our anchored neural field architecture enables the enforcement of hard physical constraints on the physics predictions without degradation in performance, exemplified by modeling divergence-free vorticity fields. Notably, the proposed models can be trained on a single GPU in less than a day and predict industry-standard surface and volume fields within seconds. Additionally, we show that the flexible design of our method enables neural simulation from a CAD geometry alone, omitting the need for costly CFD meshing procedures.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 13, 2025

Multiphysics Bench: Benchmarking and Investigating Scientific Machine Learning for Multiphysics PDEs

Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) with machine learning has recently attracted great attention, as PDEs are fundamental tools for modeling real-world systems that range from fundamental physical science to advanced engineering disciplines. Most real-world physical systems across various disciplines are actually involved in multiple coupled physical fields rather than a single field. However, previous machine learning studies mainly focused on solving single-field problems, but overlooked the importance and characteristics of multiphysics problems in real world. Multiphysics PDEs typically entail multiple strongly coupled variables, thereby introducing additional complexity and challenges, such as inter-field coupling. Both benchmarking and solving multiphysics problems with machine learning remain largely unexamined. To identify and address the emerging challenges in multiphysics problems, we mainly made three contributions in this work. First, we collect the first general multiphysics dataset, the Multiphysics Bench, that focuses on multiphysics PDE solving with machine learning. Multiphysics Bench is also the most comprehensive PDE dataset to date, featuring the broadest range of coupling types, the greatest diversity of PDE formulations, and the largest dataset scale. Second, we conduct the first systematic investigation on multiple representative learning-based PDE solvers, such as PINNs, FNO, DeepONet, and DiffusionPDE solvers, on multiphysics problems. Unfortunately, naively applying these existing solvers usually show very poor performance for solving multiphysics. Third, through extensive experiments and discussions, we report multiple insights and a bag of useful tricks for solving multiphysics with machine learning, motivating future directions in the study and simulation of complex, coupled physical systems.

  • 5 authors
·
May 23, 2025

Real-Time Prediction of Gas Flow Dynamics in Diesel Engines using a Deep Neural Operator Framework

We develop a data-driven deep neural operator framework to approximate multiple output states for a diesel engine and generate real-time predictions with reasonable accuracy. As emission norms become more stringent, the need for fast and accurate models that enable analysis of system behavior have become an essential requirement for system development. The fast transient processes involved in the operation of a combustion engine make it difficult to develop accurate physics-based models for such systems. As an alternative to physics based models, we develop an operator-based regression model (DeepONet) to learn the relevant output states for a mean-value gas flow engine model using the engine operating conditions as input variables. We have adopted a mean-value model as a benchmark for comparison, simulated using Simulink. The developed approach necessitates using the initial conditions of the output states to predict the accurate sequence over the temporal domain. To this end, a sequence-to-sequence approach is embedded into the proposed framework. The accuracy of the model is evaluated by comparing the prediction output to ground truth generated from Simulink model. The maximum mathcal L_2 relative error observed was approximately 6.5%. The sensitivity of the DeepONet model is evaluated under simulated noise conditions and the model shows relatively low sensitivity to noise. The uncertainty in model prediction is further assessed by using a mean ensemble approach. The worst-case error at the (mu + 2sigma) boundary was found to be 12%. The proposed framework provides the ability to predict output states in real-time and enables data-driven learning of complex input-output operator mapping. As a result, this model can be applied during initial development stages, where accurate models may not be available.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 2, 2023

Better Neural PDE Solvers Through Data-Free Mesh Movers

Recently, neural networks have been extensively employed to solve partial differential equations (PDEs) in physical system modeling. While major studies focus on learning system evolution on predefined static mesh discretizations, some methods utilize reinforcement learning or supervised learning techniques to create adaptive and dynamic meshes, due to the dynamic nature of these systems. However, these approaches face two primary challenges: (1) the need for expensive optimal mesh data, and (2) the change of the solution space's degree of freedom and topology during mesh refinement. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a neural PDE solver with a neural mesh adapter. To begin with, we introduce a novel data-free neural mesh adaptor, called Data-free Mesh Mover (DMM), with two main innovations. Firstly, it is an operator that maps the solution to adaptive meshes and is trained using the Monge-Amp\`ere equation without optimal mesh data. Secondly, it dynamically changes the mesh by moving existing nodes rather than adding or deleting nodes and edges. Theoretical analysis shows that meshes generated by DMM have the lowest interpolation error bound. Based on DMM, to efficiently and accurately model dynamic systems, we develop a moving mesh based neural PDE solver (MM-PDE) that embeds the moving mesh with a two-branch architecture and a learnable interpolation framework to preserve information within the data. Empirical experiments demonstrate that our method generates suitable meshes and considerably enhances accuracy when modeling widely considered PDE systems. The code can be found at: https://github.com/Peiyannn/MM-PDE.git.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 9, 2023

Physics-informed graph neural Galerkin networks: A unified framework for solving PDE-governed forward and inverse problems

Despite the great promise of the physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) in solving forward and inverse problems, several technical challenges are present as roadblocks for more complex and realistic applications. First, most existing PINNs are based on point-wise formulation with fully-connected networks to learn continuous functions, which suffer from poor scalability and hard boundary enforcement. Second, the infinite search space over-complicates the non-convex optimization for network training. Third, although the convolutional neural network (CNN)-based discrete learning can significantly improve training efficiency, CNNs struggle to handle irregular geometries with unstructured meshes. To properly address these challenges, we present a novel discrete PINN framework based on graph convolutional network (GCN) and variational structure of PDE to solve forward and inverse partial differential equations (PDEs) in a unified manner. The use of a piecewise polynomial basis can reduce the dimension of search space and facilitate training and convergence. Without the need of tuning penalty parameters in classic PINNs, the proposed method can strictly impose boundary conditions and assimilate sparse data in both forward and inverse settings. The flexibility of GCNs is leveraged for irregular geometries with unstructured meshes. The effectiveness and merit of the proposed method are demonstrated over a variety of forward and inverse computational mechanics problems governed by both linear and nonlinear PDEs.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 16, 2021

Towards a Physics Foundation Model

Foundation models have revolutionized natural language processing through a ``train once, deploy anywhere'' paradigm, where a single pre-trained model adapts to countless downstream tasks without retraining. Access to a Physics Foundation Model (PFM) would be transformative -- democratizing access to high-fidelity simulations, accelerating scientific discovery, and eliminating the need for specialized solver development. Yet current physics-aware machine learning approaches remain fundamentally limited to single, narrow domains and require retraining for each new system. We present the General Physics Transformer (GPhyT), trained on 1.8 TB of diverse simulation data, that demonstrates foundation model capabilities are achievable for physics. Our key insight is that transformers can learn to infer governing dynamics from context, enabling a single model to simulate fluid-solid interactions, shock waves, thermal convection, and multi-phase dynamics without being told the underlying equations. GPhyT achieves three critical breakthroughs: (1) superior performance across multiple physics domains, outperforming specialized architectures by up to 29x, (2) zero-shot generalization to entirely unseen physical systems through in-context learning, and (3) stable long-term predictions through 50-timestep rollouts. By establishing that a single model can learn generalizable physical principles from data alone, this work opens the path toward a universal PFM that could transform computational science and engineering.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 17, 2025 2

Going with the Speed of Sound: Pushing Neural Surrogates into Highly-turbulent Transonic Regimes

The widespread use of neural surrogates in automotive aerodynamics, enabled by datasets such as DrivAerML and DrivAerNet++, has primarily focused on bluff-body flows with large wakes. Extending these methods to aerospace, particularly in the transonic regime, remains challenging due to the high level of non-linearity of compressible flows and 3D effects such as wingtip vortices. Existing aerospace datasets predominantly focus on 2D airfoils, neglecting these critical 3D phenomena. To address this gap, we present a new dataset of CFD simulations for 3D wings in the transonic regime. The dataset comprises volumetric and surface-level fields for around 30,000 samples with unique geometry and inflow conditions. This allows computation of lift and drag coefficients, providing a foundation for data-driven aerodynamic optimization of the drag-lift Pareto front. We evaluate several state-of-the-art neural surrogates on our dataset, including Transolver and AB-UPT, focusing on their out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization over geometry and inflow variations. AB-UPT demonstrates strong performance for transonic flowfields and reproduces physically consistent drag-lift Pareto fronts even for unseen wing configurations. Our results demonstrate that AB-UPT can approximate drag-lift Pareto fronts for unseen geometries, highlighting its potential as an efficient and effective tool for rapid aerodynamic design exploration. To facilitate future research, we open-source our dataset at https://huggingface.co/datasets/EmmiAI/Emmi-Wing.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 26, 2025

DIFFTACTILE: A Physics-based Differentiable Tactile Simulator for Contact-rich Robotic Manipulation

We introduce DIFFTACTILE, a physics-based differentiable tactile simulation system designed to enhance robotic manipulation with dense and physically accurate tactile feedback. In contrast to prior tactile simulators which primarily focus on manipulating rigid bodies and often rely on simplified approximations to model stress and deformations of materials in contact, DIFFTACTILE emphasizes physics-based contact modeling with high fidelity, supporting simulations of diverse contact modes and interactions with objects possessing a wide range of material properties. Our system incorporates several key components, including a Finite Element Method (FEM)-based soft body model for simulating the sensing elastomer, a multi-material simulator for modeling diverse object types (such as elastic, elastoplastic, cables) under manipulation, a penalty-based contact model for handling contact dynamics. The differentiable nature of our system facilitates gradient-based optimization for both 1) refining physical properties in simulation using real-world data, hence narrowing the sim-to-real gap and 2) efficient learning of tactile-assisted grasping and contact-rich manipulation skills. Additionally, we introduce a method to infer the optical response of our tactile sensor to contact using an efficient pixel-based neural module. We anticipate that DIFFTACTILE will serve as a useful platform for studying contact-rich manipulations, leveraging the benefits of dense tactile feedback and differentiable physics. Code and supplementary materials are available at the project website https://difftactile.github.io/.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 13, 2024

Towards Universal Mesh Movement Networks

Solving complex Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) accurately and efficiently is an essential and challenging problem in all scientific and engineering disciplines. Mesh movement methods provide the capability to improve the accuracy of the numerical solution without increasing the overall mesh degree of freedom count. Conventional sophisticated mesh movement methods are extremely expensive and struggle to handle scenarios with complex boundary geometries. However, existing learning-based methods require re-training from scratch given a different PDE type or boundary geometry, which limits their applicability, and also often suffer from robustness issues in the form of inverted elements. In this paper, we introduce the Universal Mesh Movement Network (UM2N), which -- once trained -- can be applied in a non-intrusive, zero-shot manner to move meshes with different size distributions and structures, for solvers applicable to different PDE types and boundary geometries. UM2N consists of a Graph Transformer (GT) encoder for extracting features and a Graph Attention Network (GAT) based decoder for moving the mesh. We evaluate our method on advection and Navier-Stokes based examples, as well as a real-world tsunami simulation case. Our method outperforms existing learning-based mesh movement methods in terms of the benchmarks described above. In comparison to the conventional sophisticated Monge-Amp\`ere PDE-solver based method, our approach not only significantly accelerates mesh movement, but also proves effective in scenarios where the conventional method fails. Our project page is at https://erizmr.github.io/UM2N/.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 29, 2024

Fully Compressible Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations of Solar Convection Zones with CHORUS++

The objective of this study is to develop a fully compressible magnetohydrodynamic solver for fast simulations of the global dynamo of the Sun using unstructured grids and GPUs. Accurate modeling of the Sun's convective layers is vital to predicting the Sun's behavior, including the solar dynamo and sunspot cycles. Currently, there are many efficient codes capable of conducting these large simulations; however, many assume an anealastic density distribution. The anelastic assumption is capable of producing accurate results for low mach numbers; however, it fails in regions with a higher mach number and a fully compressible flow must be considered. To avoid these issues, Wang et al. [1] created a Compressible High-ORder Unstructured Spectral difference (CHORUS) code for simulating fluid dynamics inside stars and planets. CHORUS++ augmented the CHORUS code to adopt a higher degree of polynomials by using cubed-sphere meshing and transfinite mapping to perform simulations on unstructured grids [2]. Recently, CHORUS++ was further developed for parallel magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) solutions on GPUs at Clarkson University. In this study the solar benchmark problems presented by Chen et al. [2] are extended to unsteady solar dynamo problems, with two different density scale heights. The CHORUS-MHD code is further accelerated by multiple GPUs and used to successfully solve these solar dynamo benchmark problems. [1] Wang, J., Liang, C., and Miesch, M. S., "A Compressible High-Order Unstructured Spectral Difference Code for Stratified Convection in Rotating Spherical Shells," Journal of Computational Physics, Vol. 290, 2015, pp. 90-111. [2] Chen, K., Liang, C., and Wan, M., "Arbitrarily high-order accurate simulations of compressible rotationally constrained convection using a transfinite mapping on cubed-sphere grids," Physics of Fluids, Vol. 35, 2023, p. 086120.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 24, 2025

GASP: Gaussian Splatting for Physic-Based Simulations

Physics simulation is paramount for modeling and utilizing 3D scenes in various real-world applications. However, integrating with state-of-the-art 3D scene rendering techniques such as Gaussian Splatting (GS) remains challenging. Existing models use additional meshing mechanisms, including triangle or tetrahedron meshing, marching cubes, or cage meshes. Alternatively, we can modify the physics-grounded Newtonian dynamics to align with 3D Gaussian components. Current models take the first-order approximation of a deformation map, which locally approximates the dynamics by linear transformations. In contrast, our GS for Physics-Based Simulations (GASP) pipeline uses parametrized flat Gaussian distributions. Consequently, the problem of modeling Gaussian components using the physics engine is reduced to working with 3D points. In our work, we present additional rules for manipulating Gaussians, demonstrating how to adapt the pipeline to incorporate meshes, control Gaussian sizes during simulations, and enhance simulation efficiency. This is achieved through the Gaussian grouping strategy, which implements hierarchical structuring and enables simulations to be performed exclusively on selected Gaussians. The resulting solution can be integrated into any physics engine that can be treated as a black box. As demonstrated in our studies, the proposed pipeline exhibits superior performance on a diverse range of benchmark datasets designed for 3D object rendering. The project webpage, which includes additional visualizations, can be found at https://waczjoan.github.io/GASP.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 9, 2024

Meta Learning of Interface Conditions for Multi-Domain Physics-Informed Neural Networks

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are emerging as popular mesh-free solvers for partial differential equations (PDEs). Recent extensions decompose the domain, applying different PINNs to solve the equation in each subdomain and aligning the solution at the interface of the subdomains. Hence, they can further alleviate the problem complexity, reduce the computational cost, and allow parallelization. However, the performance of the multi-domain PINNs is sensitive to the choice of the interface conditions for solution alignment. While quite a few conditions have been proposed, there is no suggestion about how to select the conditions according to specific problems. To address this gap, we propose META Learning of Interface Conditions (METALIC), a simple, efficient yet powerful approach to dynamically determine the optimal interface conditions for solving a family of parametric PDEs. Specifically, we develop two contextual multi-arm bandit models. The first one applies to the entire training procedure, and online updates a Gaussian process (GP) reward surrogate that given the PDE parameters and interface conditions predicts the solution error. The second one partitions the training into two stages, one is the stochastic phase and the other deterministic phase; we update a GP surrogate for each phase to enable different condition selections at the two stages so as to further bolster the flexibility and performance. We have shown the advantage of METALIC on four bench-mark PDE families.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 23, 2022

Homogenization framework for rigid and non-rigid foldable origami metamaterials

Origami metamaterials typically consist of folded sheets with periodic patterns, conferring them with remarkable mechanical properties. In the context of Continuum Mechanics, the majority of existing predictive methods are mechanism analogs which favor rigid folding and panel bending. While effective in predicting primary deformation modes, existing methods fall short in capturing the full spectrum of deformation of non-rigid foldable origami, such as the emergence of curvature along straight creases, local strain at vertices and warpage in panels. To fully capture the entire deformation spectrum and enhance the accuracy of existing methods, this paper introduces a homogenization framework for origami metamaterials where the faces are modeled as plate elements. Both asymptotic and energy-based homogenization methods are formulated and implemented. As a representative crease pattern, we examine the Miura origami sheet homogenized as an equivalent Kirchhoff-Love plate. The results reveal that certain effective elastic properties are nonlinearly related to both the initial fold angle and the crease stiffness. When benchmarked with results from fully resolved simulations, our framework yields errors up to 12.9\%, while existing models, including the bar-and-hinge model and the rigid-panel model, show up to 161\% error. The differences in errors are associated with the complex modes of crease and panel deformation in non-rigid origami, unexplored by the existing models. This work demonstrates a precise and efficient continuum framework for origami metamaterials as an effective strategy for predicting their elastic properties, understanding their mechanics, and designing their functionalities.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 22, 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

AI-University: An LLM-based platform for instructional alignment to scientific classrooms

We introduce AI University (AI-U), a flexible framework for AI-driven course content delivery that adapts to instructors' teaching styles. At its core, AI-U fine-tunes a large language model (LLM) with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to generate instructor-aligned responses from lecture videos, notes, and textbooks. Using a graduate-level finite-element-method (FEM) course as a case study, we present a scalable pipeline to systematically construct training data, fine-tune an open-source LLM with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), and optimize its responses through RAG-based synthesis. Our evaluation - combining cosine similarity, LLM-based assessment, and expert review - demonstrates strong alignment with course materials. We also have developed a prototype web application, available at https://my-ai-university.com, that enhances traceability by linking AI-generated responses to specific sections of the relevant course material and time-stamped instances of the open-access video lectures. Our expert model is found to have greater cosine similarity with a reference on 86% of test cases. An LLM judge also found our expert model to outperform the base Llama 3.2 model approximately four times out of five. AI-U offers a scalable approach to AI-assisted education, paving the way for broader adoption in higher education. Here, our framework has been presented in the setting of a class on FEM - a subject that is central to training PhD and Master students in engineering science. However, this setting is a particular instance of a broader context: fine-tuning LLMs to research content in science.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 10, 2025 2

Aligning Optimization Trajectories with Diffusion Models for Constrained Design Generation

Generative models have had a profound impact on vision and language, paving the way for a new era of multimodal generative applications. While these successes have inspired researchers to explore using generative models in science and engineering to accelerate the design process and reduce the reliance on iterative optimization, challenges remain. Specifically, engineering optimization methods based on physics still outperform generative models when dealing with constrained environments where data is scarce and precision is paramount. To address these challenges, we introduce Diffusion Optimization Models (DOM) and Trajectory Alignment (TA), a learning framework that demonstrates the efficacy of aligning the sampling trajectory of diffusion models with the optimization trajectory derived from traditional physics-based methods. This alignment ensures that the sampling process remains grounded in the underlying physical principles. Our method allows for generating feasible and high-performance designs in as few as two steps without the need for expensive preprocessing, external surrogate models, or additional labeled data. We apply our framework to structural topology optimization, a fundamental problem in mechanical design, evaluating its performance on in- and out-of-distribution configurations. Our results demonstrate that TA outperforms state-of-the-art deep generative models on in-distribution configurations and halves the inference computational cost. When coupled with a few steps of optimization, it also improves manufacturability for out-of-distribution conditions. By significantly improving performance and inference efficiency, DOM enables us to generate high-quality designs in just a few steps and guide them toward regions of high performance and manufacturability, paving the way for the widespread application of generative models in large-scale data-driven design.

  • 4 authors
·
May 29, 2023

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

Pre-Generating Multi-Difficulty PDE Data for Few-Shot Neural PDE Solvers

A key aspect of learned partial differential equation (PDE) solvers is that the main cost often comes from generating training data with classical solvers rather than learning the model itself. Another is that there are clear axes of difficulty--e.g., more complex geometries and higher Reynolds numbers--along which problems become (1) harder for classical solvers and thus (2) more likely to benefit from neural speedups. Towards addressing this chicken-and-egg challenge, we study difficulty transfer on 2D incompressible Navier-Stokes, systematically varying task complexity along geometry (number and placement of obstacles), physics (Reynolds number), and their combination. Similar to how it is possible to spend compute to pre-train foundation models and improve their performance on downstream tasks, we find that by classically solving (analogously pre-generating) many low and medium difficulty examples and including them in the training set, it is possible to learn high-difficulty physics from far fewer samples. Furthermore, we show that by combining low and high difficulty data, we can spend 8.9x less compute on pre-generating a dataset to achieve the same error as using only high difficulty examples. Our results highlight that how we allocate classical-solver compute across difficulty levels is as important as how much we allocate overall, and suggest substantial gains from principled curation of pre-generated PDE data for neural solvers. Our code is available at https://github.com/Naman-Choudhary-AI-ML/pregenerating-pde

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 29, 2025

PhysicsFormer: An Efficient and Fast Attention-Based Physics Informed Neural Network for Solving Incompressible Navier Stokes Equations

Traditional experimental and numerical approaches for fluid dynamics problems often suffer from high computational cost, mesh sensitivity, and limited capability in capturing complex physical behaviors. Moreover, conventional physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) frequently struggle in chaotic and highly unsteady flow regimes. In this work, we propose PhysicsFormer, a fast and efficient transformer-based physics-informed framework that incorporates multi-head encoder-decoder cross-attention. Unlike multilayer perceptron-based PINNs, PhysicsFormer operates on sequential representations constructed from spatio-temporal data, enabling effective learning of long-range temporal dependencies and improved propagation of initial condition information. A data-embedding strategy is employed to convert spatio-temporal points into pseudo-sequences, while a dynamics-weighted loss function replaces the standard PINNs formulation. Owing to its parallel learning structure, PhysicsFormer demonstrates superior computational efficiency compared to existing transformer-based approaches. The framework is validated on Burgers' equation and flow reconstruction governed by the Navier-Stokes equations, achieving mean squared errors on the order of 10^{-6}. In addition, an inverse problem involving parameter identification in the two-dimensional incompressible Navier-Stokes equations is investigated. For clean data, PhysicsFormer achieves zero identification error for both λ_1 and λ_2; under 1% Gaussian noise, the errors are 0.07% for λ_1 and 0% for λ_2. These results demonstrate that PhysicsFormer provides a reliable and computationally efficient surrogate modeling framework for time-dependent fluid flow problems.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 7

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

High-performance symbolic-numerics via multiple dispatch

As mathematical computing becomes more democratized in high-level languages, high-performance symbolic-numeric systems are necessary for domain scientists and engineers to get the best performance out of their machine without deep knowledge of code optimization. Naturally, users need different term types either to have different algebraic properties for them, or to use efficient data structures. To this end, we developed Symbolics.jl, an extendable symbolic system which uses dynamic multiple dispatch to change behavior depending on the domain needs. In this work we detail an underlying abstract term interface which allows for speed without sacrificing generality. We show that by formalizing a generic API on actions independent of implementation, we can retroactively add optimized data structures to our system without changing the pre-existing term rewriters. We showcase how this can be used to optimize term construction and give a 113x acceleration on general symbolic transformations. Further, we show that such a generic API allows for complementary term-rewriting implementations. We demonstrate the ability to swap between classical term-rewriting simplifiers and e-graph-based term-rewriting simplifiers. We showcase an e-graph ruleset which minimizes the number of CPU cycles during expression evaluation, and demonstrate how it simplifies a real-world reaction-network simulation to halve the runtime. Additionally, we show a reaction-diffusion partial differential equation solver which is able to be automatically converted into symbolic expressions via multiple dispatch tracing, which is subsequently accelerated and parallelized to give a 157x simulation speedup. Together, this presents Symbolics.jl as a next-generation symbolic-numeric computing environment geared towards modeling and simulation.

  • 7 authors
·
May 9, 2021