On the Generalization in Topology Optimization via Sensitivity-Conditioned Bernoulli Flow Matching

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Rashed, Mohammad, Madeira, Duarte F. Valoroso, Gholami, Babak, Guerbuez, Caglar, Yang, Yunjia, Thuerey, Nils
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Rashed, Mohammad
Madeira, Duarte F. Valoroso
Gholami, Babak
Guerbuez, Caglar
Yang, Yunjia
Thuerey, Nils
author_facet Rashed, Mohammad
Madeira, Duarte F. Valoroso
Gholami, Babak
Guerbuez, Caglar
Yang, Yunjia
Thuerey, Nils
contents Surrogate models for topology optimization (TO) exhibit highly variable out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization under distribution shifts such as changing loads or boundary conditions, yet the source of this variability remains unclear. We hypothesize that OOD performance is governed by how much information the conditioning signal preserves about the adjoint sensitivity (reduced gradient) that drives classical TO. Modeling the TO pipeline as a causal Markov chain, the Data Processing Inequality establishes that, under this abstraction, the sensitivity field is an information-theoretically optimal conditioning signal for topology prediction. However, computing exact adjoint sensitivities can be expensive or unavailable in practice; we observe that certain physical fields can approximate sensitivities through monotone transformations. To formalize this, we introduce \textbf{pseudo-sensitivities} to characterize which fields enable generalization versus those that are information-poor. We then show that a sensitivity-conditioned Bernoulli flow-matching generator empirically confirms these predictions: conditioning on sensitivities yields state-of-the-art OOD performance, while increasingly distant physical fields degrade toward raw parameter conditioning. Results hold across structural TO benchmarks under load shifts and our new CFD-TO dataset under boundary-condition shifts such as multi-outlet configurations. Code and datasets are available at https://tum-pbs.github.io/topotransformer/ .
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_02179
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Generalization in Topology Optimization via Sensitivity-Conditioned Bernoulli Flow Matching
Rashed, Mohammad
Madeira, Duarte F. Valoroso
Gholami, Babak
Guerbuez, Caglar
Yang, Yunjia
Thuerey, Nils
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Surrogate models for topology optimization (TO) exhibit highly variable out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization under distribution shifts such as changing loads or boundary conditions, yet the source of this variability remains unclear. We hypothesize that OOD performance is governed by how much information the conditioning signal preserves about the adjoint sensitivity (reduced gradient) that drives classical TO. Modeling the TO pipeline as a causal Markov chain, the Data Processing Inequality establishes that, under this abstraction, the sensitivity field is an information-theoretically optimal conditioning signal for topology prediction. However, computing exact adjoint sensitivities can be expensive or unavailable in practice; we observe that certain physical fields can approximate sensitivities through monotone transformations. To formalize this, we introduce \textbf{pseudo-sensitivities} to characterize which fields enable generalization versus those that are information-poor. We then show that a sensitivity-conditioned Bernoulli flow-matching generator empirically confirms these predictions: conditioning on sensitivities yields state-of-the-art OOD performance, while increasingly distant physical fields degrade toward raw parameter conditioning. Results hold across structural TO benchmarks under load shifts and our new CFD-TO dataset under boundary-condition shifts such as multi-outlet configurations. Code and datasets are available at https://tum-pbs.github.io/topotransformer/ .
title On the Generalization in Topology Optimization via Sensitivity-Conditioned Bernoulli Flow Matching
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02179