Multi-physics Simulation Guided Generative Diffusion Models with Applications in Fluid and Heat Dynamics

Abstract

In this paper, we present a generic physics-informed generative model called MPDM that integrates multi-fidelity physics simulations with diffusion models. MPDM categorizes multi-fidelity physics simulations into inexpensive and expensive simulations, depending on computational costs. The inexpensive simulations, which can be obtained with low latency, directly inject contextual information into DDMs. Furthermore, when results from expensive simulations are available, MPDM refines the quality of generated samples via a guided diffusion process. This design separates the training of a denoising diffusion model from physics-informed conditional probability models, thus lending flexibility to practitioners. MPDM builds on Bayesian probabilistic models and is equipped with a theoretical guarantee that provides upper bounds on the Wasserstein distance between the sample and underlying true distribution. The probabilistic nature of MPDM also provides a convenient approach for uncertainty quantification in prediction. Our models excel in cases where physics simulations are imperfect and sometimes inaccessible. We use a numerical simulation in fluid dynamics and a case study in heat dynamics within laser-based metal powder deposition additive manufacturing to demonstrate how MPDM seamlessly integrates multi-idelity physics simulations and observations to obtain surrogates with superior predictive performance.