Physically-Informed Flow Matching with Graph Neural Networks for Complex Fluid Dynamics

Read full text
Authors: Association for Artificial Intelligence 2026, Xiaozhuang Song, Tianshu Yu
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations traditionally require extensive computational resources, limiting their utility in many scientific and engineering applications at scale. We introduce Physically-Informed Flow Matching Graph Networks (PIFM-GN), a novel generative framework that directly samples fluid states under specified physical conditions without requiring expensive time-stepping simulations. The key innovation of our approach is the incorporation of incompressibility constraints directly into the flow matching transport process by parameterizing velocity fields through vector potentials, with graph-based curl operators ensuring divergence-free predictions without requiring global pressure-Poisson solves. Experiments on diverse fluid dynamics problems -- ranging from two-dimensional surface pressure distributions and complete flow fields, to complex three-dimensional airflow fields -- demonstrate that PIFM-GN generates high-fidelity samples with significantly fewer sampling steps than diffusion-based alternatives. Most notably, our model maintains competitive performance even with a single sampling step, a regime where diffusion models completely fail. Our generated samples accurately reproduce the statistical characteristics of target flows, successfully capturing multi-modal pressure distributions across various flow conditions, while achieving significant computational speedups compared to diffusion-based methods. PIFM-GN thus enables efficient generation of fluid states for downstream analysis and design tasks in scientific and engineering applications. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/pifm-gn-F75F/.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Model Reduction and Neural Networks Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis Computational Fluid Dynamics and Aerodynamics

Publication details

Journal / source
Underline Science Inc.
Publication date
7 January 2026
Language
EN