TGN: A Temporal Graph Network for Physics Prediction

Abstract

Long-term prediction of physical systems on irregular unstructured meshes is extremely challenging due to the spatial complexityof meshes and the dynamic changes over time; namely, spatial dependence and temporal dependence. Recently, graph-based next-step prediction models have achieved great success in the task of modeling complex high-dimensional physical systems. However, due to these models ignoring the temporal dependence, they inevitably suffer from the effects of error accumulation. To capture the spatial and temporal dependence simultaneously, we propose a temporal graph network (TGN) to predict the long-term dynamics of complex physical systems. Specifically, we introduce an Encode-Process-Decode architecture to capture spatial dependence and create low-dimensional vector representations of system states. Additionally, a temporal model is introduced to learn the dynamic changes in the low-dimensional vector representations to capture temporal dependence. Our model can capture spatiotemporal correlations within physical systems. On some complex long-term prediction tasks in fluid dynamics, such as airfoil flow and cylinder flow, the prediction error of our method is significantly lower than the competitive GNN baseline. We show accurate phase predictions even for very long prediction sequences.