Beyond the Patterns 35 - Nils Thuerey – Differentiable Physics Simulations for Deep Learning

It’s a great pleasure to welcome FAU Alumnus Nils Thuerey to our lab for an invited presentation! Abstract:  In this talk, I will focus on the possibilities that arise from recent advances in the area of deep learning for physical simulations. In this context, especially the Navier-Stokes equations represent an interesting and challenging advection-diffusion PDE that poses a variety of challenges for deep learning methods. In particular, I will focus on differentiable physics solvers within the larger field of differentiable programming. Differentiable solvers are very powerful tools to guide deep learning processes and support finding desirable solutions. The existing numerical methods for efficient solvers can be leveraged within learning tasks to provide crucial information in the form of reliable gradients to update the weights of a neural network. Interestingly, it turns out to be beneficial to combine supervised and physics-based approaches. The former poses a much simpler learning task by providing