UniFluids: Unified Neural Operator Learning with Conditional Flow-matching
About
Partial differential equation (PDE) simulation holds extensive significance in scientific research. Currently, the integration of deep neural networks to learn solution operators of PDEs has introduced great potential. In this paper, we present UniFluids, a conditional flow-matching framework that harnesses the scalability of diffusion Transformer to unify learning of solution operators across diverse PDEs with varying dimensionality and physical variables. Unlike the autoregressive PDE foundation models, UniFluids adopts flow-matching to achieve parallel sequence generation, making it the first such approach for unified operator learning. Specifically, the introduction of a unified four-dimensional spatiotemporal representation for the heterogeneous PDE datasets enables joint training and conditional encoding. Furthermore, we find the effective dimension of the PDE dataset is much lower than its patch dimension. We thus employ $x$-prediction in the flow-matching operator learning, which is verified to significantly improve prediction accuracy. We conduct a large-scale evaluation of UniFluids on several PDE datasets covering spatial dimensions 1D, 2D and 3D. Experimental results show that UniFluids achieves strong prediction accuracy and demonstrates good scalability and cross-scenario generalization capability. The code will be released later.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PDE solving | PDEBench 2D Shallow Water Equations | Relative L2 Error0.0024 | 11 | |
| PDE solving | PDEBench 1D Advection | Relative L2 Error0.28 | 9 | |
| PDE solving | PDEBench 1D Burgers | Relative L2 Error1.01 | 9 | |
| PDE solving | PDEBench 1D CFD | Relative L2 Error0.0247 | 8 | |
| PDE solving | PDEBench 2D Incompressible Navier-Stokes | Relative L2 Error0.0198 | 8 | |
| PDE solving | PDEBench 3D Turbulent CFD | Relative L2 Error0.4155 | 8 | |
| PDE solving | PDEBench 2D CFD (M = 1) | Relative L2-error0.0046 | 5 | |
| PDE solving | PDEBench 2D CFD (M = 0.1) | Relative L2 Error0.0033 | 5 | |
| PDE solving | PDEBench 2D CFD (ALL) | Relative L2 Error0.004 | 5 | |
| PDE solution modeling | PDEBench 2D Shock wave dynamics (unseen cases) | nRMSE0.216 | 4 |