Data-Efficient Inference of Neural Fluid Fields via SciML Foundation Model

Abstract: Recent developments in 3D vision have enabled successful progress in inferring neural fluid fields and realistic rendering of fluid dynamics. However, these methods require real-world flow captures, which demand dense video sequences and specialized lab setups, making the process costly and challenging. Scientific machine learning (SciML) foundation models, which are pretrained on extensive simulations of partial differential equations (PDEs), encode rich multiphysics knowledge and thus provide promising sources of domain priors for inferring fluid fields. Nevertheless, their potential to advance real-world vision problems remains largely underexplored, raising questions about the transferability and practical utility of these foundation models. In this work, we demonstrate that SciML foundation model can significantly improve the data efficiency of inferring real-world 3D fluid dynamics with improved generalization. At the core of our method is leveraging the strong forecasting capabilities and meaningful representations of SciML foundation models. We equip neural fluid fields with a novel collaborative training approach that utilizes augmented views and fluid features extracted by our foundation model. Our method demonstrates significant improvements in both quantitative metrics and visual quality, showcasing the practical applicability of SciML foundation models in real-world fluid dynamics.