Efficient posterior inference & generalization in physics-based Bayesian inference with conditional GANs

Deep Ray, Dhruv V Patel, Harisankar Ramaswamy, Assad Oberai

Keywords: Bayesian inference, conditional GAN, generalizability, uncertainty quantification, physics-based

TL;DR: We use conditional GANs to solve physic-based inverse problems, and investigate their performance on out-of-distribution data.

Abstract: In this work, we propose a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) to sample from the posterior of physics-based Bayesian inference problems. We utilize a U-Net architecture for the generator and inject the latent variable using conditional instance normalization. We solve the inverse heat conduction problem and demonstrate how the proposed strategy effectively quantifies the uncertainty in the inferred field. We also show that the structure of the generator promotes generalizability due to the local-nature of the learned inverse map.