Swarm Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Mesh Refinement

Niklas Freymuth, Philipp Dahlinger, Tobias Würth, Luise Kärger, Gerhard Neumann

Keywords: Adaptive Mesh Refinement, Swarm Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR: We formalize Adaptive Mesh Refinement as a Swarm Reinforcement Problem to learn reliable and effective refinement strategies on elliptical partial differential equations.

Abstract: Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) is crucial for mesh-based simulations, as it allows for dynamically adjusting the resolution of a mesh to trade off computational cost with the simulation accuracy. Yet, existing methods for AMR either use task-dependent heuristics, expensive error estimators, or do not scale well to larger meshes or more complex problems. In this paper, we formalize AMR as a Swarm Reinforcement Learning problem, viewing each element of a mesh as part of a collaborative system of simple and homogeneous agents. We combine this problem formulation with a novel agent-wise reward function and Graph Neural Networks, allowing us to learn reliable and scalable refinement strategies on arbitrary systems of equations. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving the accuracy and efficiency of complex simulations. Our results show that we outperform learned baselines and achieve a refinement quality that is on par with a traditional error-based AMR refinement strategy without requiring error indicators during inference.

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/swarm-reinforcement-learning-for-adaptive/code)