Space-Time Continuous PDE Forecasting using Equivariant Neural Fields
About
Recently, Conditional Neural Fields (NeFs) have emerged as a powerful modelling paradigm for PDEs, by learning solutions as flows in the latent space of the Conditional NeF. Although benefiting from favourable properties of NeFs such as grid-agnosticity and space-time-continuous dynamics modelling, this approach limits the ability to impose known constraints of the PDE on the solutions -- e.g. symmetries or boundary conditions -- in favour of modelling flexibility. Instead, we propose a space-time continuous NeF-based solving framework that - by preserving geometric information in the latent space - respects known symmetries of the PDE. We show that modelling solutions as flows of pointclouds over the group of interest $G$ improves generalization and data-efficiency. We validated that our framework readily generalizes to unseen spatial and temporal locations, as well as geometric transformations of the initial conditions - where other NeF-based PDE forecasting methods fail - and improve over baselines in a number of challenging geometries.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Displacement Prediction | 2D DeformableObjectsCollision unseen object shapes (test) | MSE (1 step)0.293 | 5 | |
| Displacement Prediction | 2D DeformableObjectsCollision unseen object combinations (test) | MSE (1-step)0.309 | 5 | |
| Deformable object collision prediction | Cube 3D (test) | Penetration Index (I_pen)0.24 | 4 | |
| Deformable object collision prediction | Alphabet 3D (test) | Penetration Error (x10^-6)0.2 | 4 | |
| Deformable object collision prediction | Cow 3D (test) | I_pen (×10^-6)92.4 | 4 | |
| Displacement Prediction | Spot cow 3D deformable body collision (test) | MSE (1-step)0.0071 | 4 | |
| Deformable objects neural simulation | Three-object collision unseen (test) | MSE (1-step)1.407 | 4 | |
| Displacement Prediction | Cubic 3D deformable body collision horizontal plane | MSE (1-step)0.2225 | 4 | |
| Displacement Prediction | Cubic 3D deformable body collision midair | MSE (1-step)1.3936 | 4 |