# A Physics-informed Diffusion Model for High-fidelity Flow Field Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.14680 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14680/

## Key facts

- Cited by 152 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Flow matching, time series and science, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 35 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Nov 2022.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Flow matching, time series and science](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/flow-matching-time-series-and-science/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15282/) (2021)
- [Learning to Simulate Complex Physics with Graph Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09405/) (2020)
- [Learning Mesh-Based Simulation with Graph Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03409/) (2020)
- [Physics-Informed Neural Operator for Learning Partial Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03794/) (2021)
- [Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for fluid mechanics: A review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09506/) (2021)
- [Machine learning accelerated computational fluid dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01010/) (2021)
- [SRDiff: Single Image Super-Resolution with Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14951/) (2021)
- [Message Passing Neural PDE Solvers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03376/) (2022)
- [Learning Texture Transformer Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04139/) (2020)
- [Transformer for Partial Differential Equations' Operator Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13671/) (2022)
- [Solver-in-the-Loop: Learning from Differentiable Physics to Interact with Iterative PDE-Solvers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00016/) (2020)
- [Towards Physics-informed Deep Learning for Turbulent Flow Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08655/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning Methods for Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes Simulations of Airfoil Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08217/) (2018)
- [Transformer for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11084/) (2021)
- [UNIT-DDPM: UNpaired Image Translation with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05358/) (2021)
- [Video Super-Resolution Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06847/) (2021)
- [Latent-space Physics: Towards Learning the Temporal Evolution of Fluid Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10123/) (2018)
- [Learned Coarse Models for Efficient Turbulence Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15275/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 152)

- [Scalable Transformer for PDE Surrogate Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17560/) (2023)
- [DiffusionPDE: Generative PDE-Solving Under Partial Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17763/) (2024)
- [Physics-Informed Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14404/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Autoregressive Conditional Diffusion Models for Turbulent Flow Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01745/) (2023)
- [On conditional diffusion models for PDE simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16415/) (2024)
- [CoCoGen: Physically-Consistent and Conditioned Score-based Generative Models for Forward and Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10527/) (2023)
- [Physics-Constrained Flow Matching: Sampling Generative Models with Hard Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04171/) (2025)
- [From Zero to Turbulence: Generative Modeling for 3D Flow Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01776/) (2023)
- [Gradient-Free Generation for Hard-Constrained Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01786/) (2024)
- [Debias Coarsely, Sample Conditionally: Statistical Downscaling through Optimal Transport and Probabilistic Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15618/) (2023)
- [A Denoising Diffusion Model for Fluid Field Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11661/) (2023)
- [Synthetic Lagrangian Turbulence by Generative Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08529/) (2023)
- [Bayesian Conditional Diffusion Models for Versatile Spatiotemporal Turbulence Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07896/) (2023)
- [Wavelet Diffusion Neural Operator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04833/) (2024)
- [Physics-Informed Computer Vision: A Review and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18035/) (2023)
- [Generative Latent Neural PDE Solver using Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22600/) (2025)
- [Physics vs Distributions: Pareto Optimal Flow Matching with Physics Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08604/) (2025)
- [Text2PDE: Latent Diffusion Models for Accessible Physics Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01153/) (2024)
- [Learning Distributions of Complex Fluid Simulations with Diffusion Graph Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02843/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty-aware Surrogate Models for Airfoil Flow Simulations with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05320/) (2023)
- [Physics Informed Token Transformer for Solving Partial Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08757/) (2023)
- [Stacked networks improve physics-informed training: applications to neural networks and deep operator networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06483/) (2023)
- [FunDiff: Diffusion Models over Function Spaces for Physics-Informed Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07902/) (2025)
- [SuperBench: A Super-Resolution Benchmark Dataset for Scientific Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14070/) (2023)
- [Real-time Inference and Extrapolation via a Diffusion-inspired Temporal Transformer Operator (DiTTO)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09072/) (2023)
- [Generative Learning of the Solution of Parametric Partial Differential Equations Using Guided Diffusion Models and Virtual Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00157/) (2024)
- [Diffusion State-Guided Projected Gradient for Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03463/) (2024)
- [Spatially-Aware Diffusion Models with Cross-Attention for Global Field Reconstruction with Sparse Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00230/) (2024)
- [Data-Driven Stochastic Closure Modeling via Conditional Diffusion Model and Neural Operator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02965/) (2024)
- [Operator Learning for Reconstructing Flow Fields from Sparse Measurements: an Energy Transformer Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08339/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Machine learning models are gaining increasing popularity in the domain of fluid dynamics for their potential to accelerate the production of high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics data. However, many recently proposed machine learning models for high-fidelity data reconstruction require low-fidelity data for model training. Such requirement restrains the application performance of these models, since their data reconstruction accuracy would drop significantly if the low-fidelity input data used in model test has a large deviation from the training data. To overcome this restraint, we propose a diffusion model which only uses high-fidelity data at training. With different configurations, our model is able to reconstruct high-fidelity data from either a regular low-fidelity sample or a sparsely measured sample, and is also able to gain an accuracy increase by using physics-informed conditioning information from a known partial differential equation when that is available. Experimental results demonstrate that our model can produce accurate reconstruction results for 2d turbulent flows based on different input sources without retraining.