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Poster

Predicting Physics in Mesh-reduced Space with Temporal Attention

XU HAN · Han Gao · Tobias Pfaff · Jian-Xun Wang · Liping Liu

Keywords: [ Fluid Dynamics ] [ graph neural network ]


Abstract:

Auto-regressive sequence models for physics prediction are often restricted to low-dimensional systems, as memory cost increases with both spatial extents and sequence length. On the other hand, graph-based next-step prediction models have recently been very successful in modeling complex high-dimensional physical systems on irregular meshes, but suffer from error accumulation and drift, due to their short temporal attention span. In this paper, we present a method that marries the strengths of both approaches. We use a GNN to locally summarize features and create coarsened, compact mesh representation of the system state, onto which we apply a transformer-style temporal attention module. We use a second GNN to decode these predictions back to a full-sized graph and perform fine-scale updates. Our method outperforms a competitive GNN baseline on three complex fluid dynamics prediction tasks, from sonic shocks to vascular flow. We demonstrate stable rollouts without the need for training noise and show perfectly phase-stable predictions even for very long sequences. More broadly, we believe our approach paves the way to bringing the benefits of attention-based sequence models to solving high-dimensional complex physics tasks.

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