Infinite-Fidelity Coregionalization for Physical Simulation

Shibo Li, Zheng Wang, Robert Kirby, Shandian Zhe

Keywords: Multi-Fidelity Learning, Surrogate Modeling, Physical Simulation

TL;DR: We propose an infinite fidelity surrogate model for physical simulations and related applications which can take arbitrary/continuous fidelity's inputs and outputs.

Abstract: Multi-fidelity modeling and learning is important in physical simulation related applications. It can leverage both low-fidelity and high-fidelity examples for training so as to reduce the cost of data generation yet still achieving good performance. While existing approaches only model finite, discrete fidelities, in practice, the feasible fidelity choice is often infinite, which can correspond to a continuous mesh spacing or finite element length. In this paper, we propose Infinite Fidelity Coregionalization (IFC). Given the data, our method can extract and exploit rich information within infinite, continuous fidelities to bolster the prediction accuracy. Our model can interpolate and/or extrapolate the predictions to novel fidelities that are not covered by the training data. Specifically, we introduce a low-dimensional latent output as a continuous function of the fidelity and input, and multiple it with a basis matrix to predict high-dimensional solution outputs. We model the latent output as a neural Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) to capture the complex relationships within and integrate information throughout the continuous fidelities. We then use Gaussian processes or another ODE to estimate the fidelity-varying bases. For efficient inference, we reorganize the bases as a tensor, and use a tensor-Gaussian variational posterior approximation to develop a scalable inference algorithm for massive outputs. We show the advantage of our method in several benchmark tasks in computational physics.