P3D: Highly Scalable 3D Neural Surrogates for Physics Simulations with Global Context

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission13119 Authors

Keywords: neural surrogates, physics simulations, transformers, 3D

TL;DR: We present a scalable framework for learning neural surrogates for high-resolution 3D physics simulations

Abstract: We present a scalable framework for learning deterministic and probabilistic neural surrogates for high-resolution 3D physics simulations. We introduce P3D, a hybrid CNN-Transformer backbone architecture targeted for 3D physics simulations, which significantly outperforms existing architectures in terms of speed and accuracy. Our proposed network can be pretrained on small patches of the simulation domain, which can be fused to obtain a global solution, optionally guided via a scalable sequence-to-sequence model to include long-range dependencies. This setup allows for training large-scale models with reduced memory and compute requirements for high-resolution datasets. We evaluate our backbone architecture against a large set of baseline methods with the objective to simultaneously learn the dynamics of 14 different types of PDEs in 3D. We demonstrate how to scale our model to high-resolution isotropic turbulence with spatial resolutions of up to $512^3$. Finally, we show the versatility of our architecture by training it as a diffusion model to produce probabilistic samples of highly turbulent 3D channel flows across varying Reynolds numbers, accurately capturing the underlying flow statistics.

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

Submission Number: 13119