An Adjoint Method for Differentiable Fluid Simulation on Flow Maps

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Li, Zhiqi, He, Jinjin, Börcsök, Barnabás, Zhang, Taiyuan, Chen, Duowen, Du, Tao, Lin, Ming C., Turk, Greg, Zhu, Bo
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Li, Zhiqi
He, Jinjin
Börcsök, Barnabás
Zhang, Taiyuan
Chen, Duowen
Du, Tao
Lin, Ming C.
Turk, Greg
Zhu, Bo
author_facet Li, Zhiqi
He, Jinjin
Börcsök, Barnabás
Zhang, Taiyuan
Chen, Duowen
Du, Tao
Lin, Ming C.
Turk, Greg
Zhu, Bo
contents This paper presents a novel adjoint solver for differentiable fluid simulation based on bidirectional flow maps. Our key observation is that the forward fluid solver and its corresponding backward, adjoint solver share the same flow map as the forward simulation. In the forward pass, this map transports fluid impulse variables from the initial frame to the current frame to simulate vortical dynamics. In the backward pass, the same map propagates adjoint variables from the current frame back to the initial frame to compute gradients. This shared long-range map allows the accuracy of gradient computation to benefit directly from improvements in flow map construction. Building on this insight, we introduce a novel adjoint solver that solves the adjoint equations directly on the flow map, enabling long-range and accurate differentiation of incompressible flows without differentiating intermediate numerical steps or storing intermediate variables, as required in conventional adjoint methods. To further improve efficiency, we propose a long-short time-sparse flow map representation for evolving adjoint variables. Our approach has low memory usage, requiring only 6.53GB of data at a resolution of $192^3$ while preserving high accuracy in tracking vorticity, enabling new differentiable simulation tasks that require precise identification, prediction, and control of vortex dynamics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_01259
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Adjoint Method for Differentiable Fluid Simulation on Flow Maps
Li, Zhiqi
He, Jinjin
Börcsök, Barnabás
Zhang, Taiyuan
Chen, Duowen
Du, Tao
Lin, Ming C.
Turk, Greg
Zhu, Bo
Graphics
Fluid Dynamics
This paper presents a novel adjoint solver for differentiable fluid simulation based on bidirectional flow maps. Our key observation is that the forward fluid solver and its corresponding backward, adjoint solver share the same flow map as the forward simulation. In the forward pass, this map transports fluid impulse variables from the initial frame to the current frame to simulate vortical dynamics. In the backward pass, the same map propagates adjoint variables from the current frame back to the initial frame to compute gradients. This shared long-range map allows the accuracy of gradient computation to benefit directly from improvements in flow map construction. Building on this insight, we introduce a novel adjoint solver that solves the adjoint equations directly on the flow map, enabling long-range and accurate differentiation of incompressible flows without differentiating intermediate numerical steps or storing intermediate variables, as required in conventional adjoint methods. To further improve efficiency, we propose a long-short time-sparse flow map representation for evolving adjoint variables. Our approach has low memory usage, requiring only 6.53GB of data at a resolution of $192^3$ while preserving high accuracy in tracking vorticity, enabling new differentiable simulation tasks that require precise identification, prediction, and control of vortex dynamics.
title An Adjoint Method for Differentiable Fluid Simulation on Flow Maps
topic Graphics
Fluid Dynamics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01259