Fast 3D Diffusion for Scalable Granular Media Synthesis

Simulating granular media, using Discrete Element Method is a computationally intensive task. This is especially true during initialization phase, which dominates total simulation time because of large displacements involved and associated kinetic energy. We overcome this bottleneck with a novel generative pipeline based on 3D diffusion models that directly synthesizes arbitrarily large granular assemblies in their final and physically realistic configurations. The approach frames the problem as a 3D generative modeling task, consisting of a two-stage pipeline. First a diffusion model is trained to generate independent 3D voxel grids representing granular media. Second, a 3D inpainting model, adapted from 2D inpainting techniques using masked inputs, stitches these grids together seamlessly, enabling synthesis of large samples with physically realistic structure. The inpainting model explores several masking strategies for the inputs to the underlying UNets by training the network to infer missing portions of voxel grids from a concatenation of noised tensors, masks, and masked tensors as input channels. The model also adapts a 2D repainting technique of re-injecting noise scheduler output with ground truth to provide a strong guidance to the 3D model. This along with weighted losses ensures long-term coherence over generation of masked regions. Both models are trained on the same binarized 3D occupancy grids extracted from small-scale DEM simulations, achieving linear scaling of computational time with respect to sample size. Quantitatively, a 1.2 m long ballasted rail track synthesis equivalent to a 3-hour DEM simulation, was completed under 20 seconds. The generated voxel grids can also be post-processed to extract grain geometries for DEM-compatibility as well, enabling physically coherent, real-time, scalable granular media synthesis for industrial applications.

Breaking the Black Box: Inherently Interpretable Physics-Informed Machine Learning for Imbalanced Seismic Data

Ground motion models (GMMs) predict how strongly the ground will shake during an earthquake. They are essential for structural analysis, seismic design, and seismic risk assessment studies. Traditional machine learning (ML) approaches are popular to develop GMMs, due to large earthquake databases worldwide. However, they operate as "black boxes," which are hard to interpret and trust, limiting their use in high-stake decisions. Additionally, these databases suffer from significant data imbalances: fewer large, critically damaging records near the fault compared to abundant, less severely damaging distant records. These two limitations are addressed in this work by developing a transparent ML architecture using the HazBinLoss function. Each input (e.g., magnitude, distance, their interaction term, etc.) is processed separately and added linearly to obtain the output, resulting in exact contribution of each term. The HazBinLoss function assigns higher weights to critical near-field large magnitude records and lower weights to less-critical far-field smaller magnitude records, during training to prevent underprediction of the most damaging scenarios. Our model captures known seismological principles and achieves comparable performance with established GMMs while maintaining transparency. This framework enables broader adoption of ML-based approaches for risk assessment studies and disaster planning.

Autoregressive regularized score-based diffusion models for multi-scenarios fluid flow prediction

Building on recent advances in scientific machine learning and generative modeling for computational fluid dynamics, we propose a conditional score-based diffusion model designed for multi-scenarios fluid flow prediction. Our model integrates an energy constraint rooted in the statistical properties of turbulent flows, improving prediction quality with minimal training, while enabling efficient sampling at low cost. The method features a simple and general architecture that requires no problem-specific design, supports plug-and-play enhancements, and enables fast and flexible solution generation. It also demonstrates an efficient conditioning mechanism that simplifies training across different scenarios without demanding a redesign of existing models. We further explore various stochastic differential equation formulations to demonstrate how thoughtful design choices enhance performance. We validate the proposed methodology through extensive experiments on complex fluid dynamics datasets encompassing a variety of flow regimes and configurations. Results demonstrate that our model consistently achieves stable, robust, and physically faithful predictions, even under challenging turbulent conditions. With properly tuned parameters, it achieves accurate results across multiple scenarios while preserving key physical and statistical properties. We present a comprehensive analysis of stochastic differential equation impact and discuss our approach across diverse fluid mechanics tasks.

Integrating Fourier Neural Operators with Diffusion Models to improve Spectral Representation of Synthetic Earthquake Ground Motion Response

Nuclear reactor buildings must be designed to withstand the dynamic load induced by strong ground motion earthquakes. For this reason, their structural behavior must be assessed in multiple realistic ground shaking scenarios (e.g., the Maximum Credible Earthquake). However, earthquake catalogs and recorded seismograms may not always be available in the region of interest. Therefore, synthetic earthquake ground motion is progressively being employed, although with some due precautions: earthquake physics is sometimes not well enough understood to be accurately reproduced with numerical tools, and the underlying epistemic uncertainties lead to prohibitive computational costs related to model calibration. In this study, we propose an AI physics-based approach to generate synthetic ground motion, based on the combination of a neural operator that approximates the elastodynamics Green's operator in arbitrary source-geology setups, enhanced by a denoising diffusion probabilistic model. The diffusion model is trained to correct the ground motion time series generated by the neural operator. Our results show that such an approach promisingly enhances the realism of the generated synthetic seismograms, with frequency biases and Goodness-Of-Fit (GOF) scores being improved by the diffusion model. This indicates that the latter is capable to mitigate the mid-frequency spectral falloff observed in the time series generated by the neural operator. Our method showcases fast and cheap inference in different site and source conditions.

Multiple-Input Fourier Neural Operator (MIFNO) for source-dependent 3D elastodynamics

Numerical simulations are essential tools to evaluate the solution of the wave equation in complex settings, such as three-dimensional (3D) domains with heterogeneous properties. However, their application is limited by high computational costs and existing surrogate models lack the flexibility of numerical solvers. This work introduces the Multiple-Input Fourier Neural Operator (MIFNO) to deal with structured 3D fields representing material properties as well as vectors describing the source characteristics. The MIFNO is applied to the problem of elastic wave propagation in the Earth's crust. It is trained on the HEMEW^S-3D database containing 30000 earthquake simulations in different heterogeneous domains with random source positions and orientations. Outputs are time- and space-dependent surface wavefields. The MIFNO predictions are assessed as good to excellent based on Goodness-Of-Fit (GOF) criteria. Wave arrival times and wave fronts' propagation are very accurate since 80% of the predictions have an excellent phase GOF. The fluctuations amplitudes are good for 87% of the predictions. The envelope score is hindered by the small-scale fluctuations that are challenging to capture due to the complex physical phenomena associated with high-frequency features. Nevertheless, the MIFNO can generalize to sources located outside the training domain and it shows good generalization ability to a real complex overthrust geology. When focusing on a region of interest, transfer learning improves the accuracy with limited additional costs, since GOF scores improved by more than 1 GOF unit with only 500 additional specific samples. The MIFNO is the first surrogate model offering the flexibility of an earthquake simulator with varying sources and material properties. Its good accuracy and massive speed-up offer new perspectives to replace numerical simulations in many-query problems.

Fourier Neural Operator Surrogate Model to Predict 3D Seismic Waves Propagation

With the recent rise of neural operators, scientific machine learning offers new solutions to quantify uncertainties associated with high-fidelity numerical simulations. Traditional neural networks, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) or Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINN), are restricted to the prediction of solutions in a predefined configuration. With neural operators, one can learn the general solution of Partial Differential Equations, such as the elastic wave equation, with varying parameters. There have been very few applications of neural operators in seismology. All of them were limited to two-dimensional settings, although the importance of three-dimensional (3D) effects is well known. In this work, we apply the Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) to predict ground motion time series from a 3D geological description. We used a high-fidelity simulation code, SEM3D, to build an extensive database of ground motions generated by 30,000 different geologies. With this database, we show that the FNO can produce accurate ground motion even when the underlying geology exhibits large heterogeneities. Intensity measures at moderate and large periods are especially well reproduced. We present the first seismological application of Fourier Neural Operators in 3D. Thanks to the generalizability of our database, we believe that our model can be used to assess the influence of geological features such as sedimentary basins on ground motion, which is paramount to evaluating site effects.