PhysicsGen: Can Generative Models Learn from Images to Predict Complex
  Physical Relations?
Authors: name: Martin Spitznagel; name: Jan Vaillant; name: Janis Keuper
Published: 2025-03-07 11:19:13

Abstract: The image-to-image translation abilities of generative learning models have
recently made significant progress in the estimation of complex (steered)
mappings between image distributions. While appearance based tasks like image
in-painting or style transfer have been studied at length, we propose to
investigate the potential of generative models in the context of physical
simulations. Providing a dataset of 300k image-pairs and baseline evaluations
for three different physical simulation tasks, we propose a benchmark to
investigate the following research questions: i) are generative models able to
learn complex physical relations from input-output image pairs? ii) what
speedups can be achieved by replacing differential equation based simulations?
While baseline evaluations of different current models show the potential for
high speedups (ii), these results also show strong limitations toward the
physical correctness (i). This underlines the need for new methods to enforce
physical correctness. Data, baseline models and evaluation code
http://www.physics-gen.org.