Multi-Fidelity Flow Matching: Cascaded Refinement of PDE Solutions
About
The source distribution in conditional flow matching is a design parameter that can be calibrated to data, not a default isotropic prior. We exploit this in Multi-Fidelity Flow Matching (MFFM), a cascade refinement framework for parametric PDE solutions: the source is calibrated to the empirical low-to-high-fidelity residual scale with local Gaussian-blur correlation, and the velocity network is conditioned on the low-fidelity solution. Conditioning makes the residual refinement problem substantially easier than unconditional field generation, while residual-calibrated source noise improves the flow-matching training geometry. A multi-resolution cascade applies the same construction independently between adjacent fidelities. After level-wise flow-matching pretraining, we fine-tune the composed cascade end-to-end with a deterministic one-step rollout, which makes one velocity evaluation per cascade level the optimized operating point at inference. The result is a learned analog of multigrid refinement that reaches the finest grid in $L$ deterministic network evaluations per query. We validate MFFM on eight benchmarks: two super-resolution problems and six spatiotemporal forecasting tasks from PDEBench, The Well, and the FNO Navier--Stokes dataset.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spatial super-resolution | Burgers spatial super-resolution (test) | NRMSE2.488 | 9 | |
| Spatio-temporal forecasting | Diffusion-Reaction (test) | NRMSE0.2509 | 9 | |
| Spatiotemporal forecasting | Shallow Water (SW) (test) | NRMSE0.0048 | 9 | |
| Spatiotemporal forecasting | Shear-T (test) | NRMSE22.53 | 9 | |
| Spatiotemporal forecasting | Shear-P (test) | NRMSE0.2671 | 9 | |
| Spatiotemporal forecasting | Active Matter (AM) (test) | NRMSE0.3162 | 9 | |
| Spatiotemporal forecasting | Navier-Stokes (NS) (test) | NRMSE0.0478 | 9 | |
| Spatial super-resolution | Darcy spatial super-resolution (test) | NRMSE0.062 | 9 |