Turbulent Flow Simulation using Autoregressive Conditional Diffusion Models

Georg Kohl, Liwei Chen, Nils Thuerey

Primary Area: applications to physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.)

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Keywords: turbulent flow, PDEs, numerical simulation, diffusion models, autoregressive models

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TL;DR: We employ autoregressive diffusion models for the simulation of turbulent flows, and find that they yield excellent accuracy and rollout stability.

Abstract: Simulating turbulent flows is crucial for a wide range of applications, and machine learning-based solvers are gaining increasing relevance. However, achieving stability when generalizing to longer rollout horizons remains a persistent challenge for learned PDE solvers. We address this challenge by introducing a fully data-driven fluid solver that utilizes an autoregressive rollout based on conditional diffusion models. We show that this approach offers clear advantages in terms of rollout stability compared to other learned baselines. Remarkably, these improvements in stability are achieved without compromising the quality of generated samples, and our model successfully generalizes to flow parameters beyond the training regime. Additionally, the probabilistic nature of the diffusion approach allows for inferring predictions that align with the statistics of the underlying physics. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the performance of our method on a range of challenging scenarios, including incompressible and transonic flows, as well as isotropic turbulence.

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Submission Number: 216