2023/04/27 by Makoto Takamoto, Francesco Alesiani, Takamoto, Makoto +3 · 7 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Computational Engineering #Computational Physics (physics.comp-ph) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Finance #Fluid Dynamics (physics.flu-dyn) #Geophysics (physics.geo-ph) #Heat Transfer and Optimization #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Model Reduction and Neural Networks #and Science (cs.CE)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2304.14118
openalex publication_date 2023/04/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) is concerned with the development of learned emulators of physical systems governed by partial differential equations (PDE). In application domains such as weather forecasting, molecular dynamics, and inverse design, ML-based surrogate models are increasingly used to augment or replace inefficient and often non-differentiable numerical simulation algorithms. While a number of ML-based methods for approximating the solutions of PDEs have been proposed in recent years, they typically do not adapt to the parameters of the PDEs, making it difficult to generalize to PDE parameters not seen during training. We propose a Channel Attention mechanism guided by PDE Parameter Embeddings (CAPE) component for neural surrogate models and a simple yet effective curriculum learning strategy. The CAPE module can be combined with neural PDE solvers allowing them to adapt to unseen PDE parameters. The curriculum learning strategy provides a seamless transition between teacher-forcing and fully auto-regressive training. We compare CAPE in conjunction with the curriculum learning strategy using a popular PDE benchmark and obtain consistent and significant improvements over the baseline models. The experiments also show several advantages of CAPE, such as its increased ability to generalize to unseen PDE parameters without large increases inference time and parameter count.