We’re happy to report that our collaborative project on 3D sparse-reconstruction and super-resolution with diffusion models, physics constraints and PDE Transformers is online now as preprint http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19971 as well as with full source code https://github.com/tum-pbs/sparse-reconstruction.
The PDE Transformer backbone https://tum-pbs.github.io/pde-transformer/landing.html works great for large-scale 3D fields with only around 1.6% coverage, and (a variant) of our ConFIG optimizer https://tum-pbs.github.io/ConFIG/ turns out to be crucial for incorporating PDE/physics constraints!
The samples below show the excellent performance for a single snapshot, and of course the distributional accuracy needs to be taken into account when targeting probabilistic tasks: the method also works remarkably well here, as shown with one example above. Please check out the paper and code and let us know how it works for you 😀
Paper abstract: The reconstruction of unsteady flow fields from limited measurements is a challenging and crucial task for many engineering applications. Machine learning models are gaining popularity in solving this problem due to their ability to learn complex patterns from data and generalize across diverse conditions. Among these, diffusion models have emerged as particularly powerful in generative tasks, producing high-quality samples by iteratively refining noisy inputs. In contrast to other methods, these generative models are capable of reconstructing the smallest scales of the fluid spectrum. In this work, we introduce a novel sampling method for diffusion models that enables the reconstruction of high-fidelity samples by guiding the reverse process using the available sparse data. Moreover, we enhance the reconstructions with available physics knowledge using a conflict-free update method during training. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we conduct experiments on 2 and 3-dimensional turbulent flow data. Our method consistently outperforms other diffusion-based methods in predicting the fluid’s structure and in pixel-wise accuracy. This study underscores the remarkable potential of diffusion models in reconstructing flow field data, paving the way for their application in Computational Fluid Dynamics research.




