Enforcing Imprecise Constraints on Generative Adversarial Networks for Emulating Physical Systems

Enforcing Imprecise Constraints on Generative Adversarial Networks for Emulating Physical Systems

Year:    2021

Author:    Yang Zeng, Jin-Long Wu, Heng Xiao

Communications in Computational Physics, Vol. 30 (2021), Iss. 3 : pp. 635–665

Abstract

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) were initially proposed to generate images by learning from a large number of samples. Recently, GANs have been used to emulate complex physical systems such as turbulent flows. However, a critical question must be answered before GANs can be considered trusted emulators for physical systems: do GANs-generated samples conform to the various physical constraints? These include both deterministic constraints (e.g., conservation laws) and statistical constraints (e.g., energy spectrum of turbulent flows). The latter have been studied in a companion paper (Wu et al., Enforcing statistical constraints in generative adversarial networks for modeling chaotic dynamical systems. Journal of Computational Physics. 406, 109209, 2020). In the present work, we enforce deterministic yet imprecise constraints on GANs by incorporating them into the loss function of the generator. We evaluate the performance of physics-constrained GANs on two representative tasks with geometrical constraints (generating points on circles) and differential constraints (generating divergence-free flow velocity fields), respectively. In both cases, the constrained GANs produced samples that conform to the underlying constraints rather accurately, even though the constraints are only enforced up to a specified interval. More importantly, the imposed constraints significantly accelerate the convergence and improve the robustness in the training, indicating that they serve as a physics-based regularization. These improvements are noteworthy, as the convergence and robustness are two well-known obstacles in the training of GANs.

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Journal Article Details

Publisher Name:    Global Science Press

Language:    English

DOI:    https://doi.org/10.4208/cicp.OA-2020-0106

Communications in Computational Physics, Vol. 30 (2021), Iss. 3 : pp. 635–665

Published online:    2021-01

AMS Subject Headings:    Global Science Press

Copyright:    COPYRIGHT: © Global Science Press

Pages:    31

Keywords:    Generative adversarial networks physics constraints physics-informed machine learning.

Author Details

Yang Zeng

Jin-Long Wu

Heng Xiao