ArXiv

A Physics-Informed Fourier-Wavelet Transformer for Multiscale Computational Fluid Dynamics Surrogate Modeling

Authors
Somyajit Chakraborty, Ming Pan, Xizhong Chen
Categories
physics.flu-dyn, cs.LG
arXiv
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24696v1
PDF
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.24696v1

Brief

A physics-informed Fourier-wavelet transformer for next-step velocity-field reconstruction combines hybrid Fourier–wavelet spectral encoding, PDE-residual–guided self-attention, and self-supervised pretraining (Masked Physics Prediction, Equation Consistency Prediction). Evaluated on cylinder-wake and fluid–structure-interaction benchmarks (arXiv 2026-06-23), it achieves NMSE 0.05875 and Pearson 0.97019 on the wake case and NMSE 2.70e-4 on the FSI case, outperforming spectral, transformer, operator-learning, and PINN baselines while improving localized wake recovery.

Why it matters

The paper (Chakraborty, Pan, Chen; arXiv 2026-06-23) introduces a physics-informed Fourier-wavelet transformer that combines hybrid Fourier-wavelet spectral encoding, physics-biased self-attention driven by PDE-residual diagnostics, and self-supervised pretraining tasks (Masked Physics Prediction and Equation Consistency Prediction).

Key details

  • On two real benchmarks the model outperforms strong baselines: cylinder-wake — all-channel normalized MSE = 0.05875 and all-channel Pearson r = 0.97019; fluid-structure-interaction — all-channel normalized MSE = 2.70e-4 (vs 4.02e-4 for the best baseline), with better recovery of near-body, wake-core, and far-wake structures.
Source evidence

Abstract

Physics-informed surrogate models can accelerate computational fluid dynamics simulations. However, many existing methods reproduce global flow patterns more reliably than localized multiscale structures. This study presents a physics-informed Fourier-wavelet transformer for next-step velocity-field reconstruction in real-world flow benchmarks. The proposed formulation combines hybrid Fourier-wavelet spectral encoding with physics-biased self-attention based on partial differential equation residual diagnostics. It also uses self-supervised pretraining through Masked Physics Prediction and Equation Consistency Prediction. The experiments are conducted on two real benchmark cases: cylinder-wake flow and fluid-structure interaction. All approaches are evaluated under a shared local protocol and compared with spectral, transformer-based, operator-learning, and physics-informed neural-network baselines. On the cylinder-wake benchmark, the proposed model achieves the best aggregate accuracy, with an all-channel normalized mean-squared error of 0.05875 and an all-channel Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.97019. On the fluid-structure-interaction benchmark, it gives the lowest all-channel normalized mean-squared error of $2.70 \times 10^{-4}$, compared with $4.02 \times 10^{-4}$ for the strongest baseline. Component-wise field comparisons and scale-separated diagnostics further show stronger recovery of localized wake structures, including near-body, wake-core, and far-wake features. The results demonstrate improved real-world flow reconstruction while maintaining a practical accuracy-cost tradeoff.