Deep Invertible Autoencoders for Dimensionality Reduction of Dynamical Systems

Constructing reduced-order models (ROMs) capable of efficiently predicting the evolution of parameter-dependent high-dimensional dynamical systems is crucial in many applications in engineering and applied sciences. A popular class of projection-based ROMs projects the high-dimensional full-order model (FOM) dynamics onto a low-dimensional manifold. These projection-based ROMs approaches often rely on classical model reduction techniques such as proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) or, more recently, on neural network architectures such as autoencoders (AEs). In the case that the ROM is constructed by the POD, one has approximation guaranteed based based on the singular values of the problem at hand. However, POD-based techniques can suffer from slow decay of the singular values in transport- and advection-dominated problems. In contrast to that, AEs allow for better reduction capabilities than the POD, often with the first few modes, but at the price of theoretical considerations. In addition, it is often observed, that AEs exhibits a plateau of the projection error with the increment of the dimension of the trial manifold. In this work, we propose an invertible AE architecture, named inv-AE, that computationally improves upon the stagnation of the reconstruction error typical of traditional AE architectures. Inv-AE is composed of several invertible neural network layers that allows for gradually recovering more information about the FOM solutions the more we increase the dimension of the reduced manifold. Through the application of inv-AE to a 1-dimensional Burgers' equation, a 2-dimensional fluid flow around an obstacle with variable geometry, and a 3-dimensional Korteweg-de Vries, we show that (i) inv-AE mitigates the issue of the characteristic plateau of AEs and (ii) inv-AE can be combined with popular autoencoder-based ROM approaches, e.g., DL-ROM, to improve their accuracy.