Physics vs Distributions: Pareto Optimal Flow Matching with Physics Constraints

Giacomo Baldan, Qiang Liu, Alberto Guardone, Nils Thuerey

Keywords: Flow Matching, Physics, PDE, Diffusion Models

TL;DR: Physics-Based Flow Matching (PBFM) is a generative modeling framework that enforces physical constraints during training

Abstract:

Physics-constrained generative modeling aims to produce high-dimensional samples that are both physically consistent and distributionally accurate, a task that remains challenging due to often conflicting optimization objectives. Recent advances in flow matching and diffusion models have enabled efficient generative modeling, but integrating physical constraints often degrades generative fidelity or requires costly inference-time corrections. Our work is the first to recognize the trade-off between distributional and physical accuracy. Based on the insight of inherently conflicting objectives, we introduce Physics-Based Flow Matching (PBFM) a method that enforces physical constraints at training time using conflict-free gradient updates and unrolling to mitigate Jensen's gap. Our approach avoids manual loss balancing and enables simultaneous optimization of generative and physical objectives. As a consequence, physics constraints do not impede inference performance. We benchmark our method across three representative PDE benchmarks. PBFM achieves a Pareto-optimal trade-off, competitive inference speed, and generalizes to a wide range of physics-constrained generative tasks, providing a practical tool for scientific machine learning.

Code and datasets available at [https://github.com/tum-pbs/PBFM](https://github.com/tum-pbs/PBFM).

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

Submission Number: 8035