# Variational Autoencoders for Learning Nonlinear Dynamics of Physical Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.03448 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03448/

## Key facts

- Cited by 50 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Dec 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Orbis: Overcoming Challenges of Long-Horizon Prediction in Driving World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13162/) (2025)
- [Generative Portrait Shadow Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05525/) (2024)
- [Task-oriented Time Series Imputation Evaluation via Generalized Representers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06652/) (2024)
- [Tabular Data Synthesis with Differential Privacy: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03351/) (2024)
- [Hyperspectral Pixel Unmixing with Latent Dirichlet Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01327/) (2022)
- [Black-Box Optimization with Implicit Constraints for Public Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18449/) (2023)
- [Anomaly Detection for Solder Joints Using β-VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11927/) (2021)
- [Knowledge Distillation-Empowered Digital Twin for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04616/) (2023)
- [Efficient Task-specific Conditional Diffusion Policies: Shortcut Model Acceleration and SO(3) Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09927/) (2025)
- [ILDiff: Generate Transparent Animated Stickers by Implicit Layout Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20901/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-CMoE: Towards Continual Mixture of Experts for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21227/) (2025)
- [CuMoLoS-MAE: A Masked Autoencoder for Remote Sensing Data Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14957/) (2025)
- [Impact of Loss Weight and Model Complexity on Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Computational Fluid Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21393/) (2025)
- [ScatterAD: Temporal-Topological Scattering Mechanism for Time Series Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24414/) (2025)
- [Intermediate Representations are Strong AI-Generated Image Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04358/) (2026)
- [On The Relevance Of The Differences Between HRTF Measurement Setups For Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04283/) (2022)
- [SpACNN-LDVAE: Spatial Attention Convolutional Latent Dirichlet Variational Autoencoder for Hyperspectral Pixel Unmixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10701/) (2023)
- [Generative Model-Driven Synthetic Training Image Generation: An Approach to Cognition in Rail Defect Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00393/) (2023)
- [How to Unlock Time Series Editing? Diffusion-Driven Approach with Multi-Grained Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05276/) (2025)
- [Modeling Time-Lapse Trajectories to Characterize Cranberry Growth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08901/) (2025)
- [Repurposing 2D Diffusion Models for 3D Shape Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13991/) (2025)
- [Latent Diffusion for Internet of Things Attack Data Generation in Intrusion Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16976/) (2026)
- [Visual Prototype Conditioned Focal Region Generation for UAV-Based Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02966/) (2026)
- [Saliency-Guided Representation with Consistency Policy Learning for Visual Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05931/) (2026)
- [A Deep Learning Generative Model Approach for Image Synthesis of Plant Leaves](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03388/) (2021)
- [Agile gesture recognition for capacitive sensing devices: adapting on-the-job](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07624/) (2023)
- [Bidirectional Adversarial Autoencoders for the design of Plasmonic Metasurfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04056/) (2024)
- [Fragment-Masked Diffusion for Molecular Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09106/) (2024)
- [Depth-Weighted Detection of Behaviours of Risk in People with Dementia using Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15519/) (2024)
- [VAE Explainer: Supplement Learning Variational Autoencoders with Interactive Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09011/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We develop data-driven methods for incorporating physical information for priors to learn parsimonious representations of nonlinear systems arising from parameterized PDEs and mechanics. Our approach is based on Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) for learning from observations nonlinear state space models. We develop ways to incorporate geometric and topological priors through general manifold latent space representations. We investigate the performance of our methods for learning low dimensional representations for the nonlinear Burgers equation and constrained mechanical systems.
