Agglomeration of Polygonal Grids using Graph Neural Networks with applications to Multigrid solvers

Agglomeration-based strategies are important both within adaptive refinement algorithms and to construct scalable multilevel algebraic solvers. In order to automatically perform agglomeration of polygonal grids, we propose the use of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to partition the connectivity graph of a computational mesh. GNNs have the advantage to process naturally and simultaneously both the graph structure of mesh and the geometrical information, such as the areas of the elements or their barycentric coordinates. This is not the case with other approaches such as METIS, a standard algorithm for graph partitioning which is meant to process only the graph information, or the k-means clustering algorithm, which can process only the geometrical information. Performance in terms of quality metrics is enhanced for Machine Learning (ML) strategies, with GNNs featuring a lower computational cost online. Such models also show a good degree of generalization when applied to more complex geometries, such as brain MRI scans, and the capability of preserving the quality of the grid. The effectiveness of these strategies is demonstrated also when applied to MultiGrid (MG) solvers in a Polygonal Discontinuous Galerkin (PolyDG) framework.

Machine Learning based refinement strategies for polyhedral grids with applications to Virtual Element and polyhedral Discontinuous Galerkin methods

We propose two new strategies based on Machine Learning techniques to handle polyhedral grid refinement, to be possibly employed within an adaptive framework. The first one employs the k-means clustering algorithm to partition the points of the polyhedron to be refined. This strategy is a variation of the well known Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation. The second one employs Convolutional Neural Networks to classify the "shape" of an element so that "ad-hoc" refinement criteria can be defined. This strategy can be used to enhance existing refinement strategies, including the k-means strategy, at a low online computational cost. We test the proposed algorithms considering two families of finite element methods that support arbitrarily shaped polyhedral elements, namely the Virtual Element Method (VEM) and the Polygonal Discontinuous Galerkin (PolyDG) method. We demonstrate that these strategies do preserve the structure and the quality of the underlaying grids, reducing the overall computational cost and mesh complexity.

Refinement of polygonal grids using Convolutional Neural Networks with applications to polygonal Discontinous Galerkin and Virtual Element methods

We propose new strategies to handle polygonal grids refinement based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We show that CNNs can be successfully employed to identify correctly the "shape" of a polygonal element so as to design suitable refinement criteria to be possibly employed within adaptive refinement strategies. We propose two refinement strategies that exploit the use of CNNs to classify elements' shape, at a low computational cost. We test the proposed idea considering two families of finite element methods that support arbitrarily shaped polygonal elements, namely Polygonal Discontinuous Galerkin (PolyDG) methods and Virtual Element Methods (VEMs). We demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can greatly improve the performance of the discretization schemes both in terms of accuracy and quality of the underlying grids. Moreover, since the training phase is performed off-line and is problem independent the overall computational costs are kept low.