Reinforcement learning for automatic quadrilateral mesh generation: a soft actor-critic approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel RL-based framework using the soft actor-critic algorithm to automate quadrilateral mesh generation, aiming to improve efficiency and quality over traditional semi-automatic methods.

Contribution

It formulates mesh generation as an MDP and applies RL to create a fully automatic system, reducing human intervention and enhancing performance.

Findings

Outperforms commercial software in scalability and generalizability

Achieves fully automatic mesh generation without human input

Demonstrates promising results in complex geometries

Abstract

This paper proposes, implements, and evaluates a reinforcement learning (RL)-based computational framework for automatic mesh generation. Mesh generation plays a fundamental role in numerical simulations in the area of computer aided design and engineering (CAD/E). It is identified as one of the critical issues in the NASA CFD Vision 2030 Study. Existing mesh generation methods suffer from high computational complexity, low mesh quality in complex geometries, and speed limitations. These methods and tools, including commercial software packages, are typically semiautomatic and they need inputs or help from human experts. By formulating the mesh generation as a Markov decision process (MDP) problem, we are able to use a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm called "soft actor-critic" to automatically learn from trials the policy of actions for mesh generation. The implementation of this RL algorithm for mesh generation allows us to build a fully automatic mesh generation system without human intervention and any extra clean-up operations, which fills the gap in the existing mesh generation tools. In the experiments to compare with two representative commercial software packages, our system demonstrates promising performance with respect to scalability, generalizability, and effectiveness.