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Main Authors: Zhou, Anthony, Wikner, Alexander, Lancelin, Amaury, Hassanzadeh, Pedram, Farimani, Amir Barati
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26282
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author Zhou, Anthony
Wikner, Alexander
Lancelin, Amaury
Hassanzadeh, Pedram
Farimani, Amir Barati
author_facet Zhou, Anthony
Wikner, Alexander
Lancelin, Amaury
Hassanzadeh, Pedram
Farimani, Amir Barati
contents Generative models have recently emerged as powerful surrogates for physical systems, demonstrating increased accuracy, stability, and/or statistical fidelity. Most approaches rely on iteratively denoising a Gaussian, a choice that may not be the most effective for autoregressive prediction tasks in PDEs and dynamical systems such as climate. In this work, we benchmark generative models across diverse physical domains and tasks, and highlight the role of stochastic interpolants. By directly learning a stochastic process between current and future states, stochastic interpolants can leverage the proximity of successive physical distributions. This allows for generative models that can use fewer sampling steps and produce more accurate predictions than models relying on transporting Gaussian noise. Our experiments suggest that generative models need to balance deterministic accuracy, spectral consistency, and probabilistic calibration, and that stochastic interpolants can potentially fulfill these requirements by adjusting their sampling. This study establishes stochastic interpolants as a competitive baseline for physical emulation and gives insight into the abilities of different generative modeling frameworks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_26282
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reframing Generative Models for Physical Systems using Stochastic Interpolants
Zhou, Anthony
Wikner, Alexander
Lancelin, Amaury
Hassanzadeh, Pedram
Farimani, Amir Barati
Machine Learning
Generative models have recently emerged as powerful surrogates for physical systems, demonstrating increased accuracy, stability, and/or statistical fidelity. Most approaches rely on iteratively denoising a Gaussian, a choice that may not be the most effective for autoregressive prediction tasks in PDEs and dynamical systems such as climate. In this work, we benchmark generative models across diverse physical domains and tasks, and highlight the role of stochastic interpolants. By directly learning a stochastic process between current and future states, stochastic interpolants can leverage the proximity of successive physical distributions. This allows for generative models that can use fewer sampling steps and produce more accurate predictions than models relying on transporting Gaussian noise. Our experiments suggest that generative models need to balance deterministic accuracy, spectral consistency, and probabilistic calibration, and that stochastic interpolants can potentially fulfill these requirements by adjusting their sampling. This study establishes stochastic interpolants as a competitive baseline for physical emulation and gives insight into the abilities of different generative modeling frameworks.
title Reframing Generative Models for Physical Systems using Stochastic Interpolants
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26282