Leveraging Scale Separation and Stochastic Closure for Data-Driven Prediction of Chaotic Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a stochastic, data-driven method combining VAE, Transformer, and Gaussian Process regression to predict chaotic turbulent flows more accurately and robustly than existing models.

Contribution

It presents a novel stochastic modeling approach that separately learns large-scale dynamics and statistical closure, improving turbulence prediction stability and accuracy.

Findings

Gaussian process closure outperforms baselines in statistical accuracy

Model captures first and second moments effectively

Provides robust confidence intervals for turbulent flow predictions

Abstract

Simulating turbulent fluid flows is a computationally prohibitive task, as it requires the resolution of fine-scale structures and the capture of complex nonlinear interactions across multiple scales. This is particularly the case in direct numerical simulation (DNS) applied to real-world turbulent applications. Consequently, extensive research has focused on analysing turbulent flows from a data-driven perspective. However, due to the complex and chaotic nature of these systems, traditional models often become unstable as they accumulate errors through autoregression, severely degrading even short-term predictions. To overcome these limitations, we propose a purely stochastic approach that separately addresses the evolution of large-scale coherent structures and the closure of high-fidelity statistical data. To this end, the dynamics of the filtered data (i.e. coherent motion) are learnt using an autoregressive model. This combines a VAE and Transformer architecture. The VAE projection is probabilistic, ensuring consistency between the model's stochasticity and the flow's statistical properties. To recover high-fidelity velocity fields from the filtered latent space, Gaussian Process (GP) regression is employed. This strategy has been tested in the context of a Kolmogorov flow exhibiting chaotic behaviour analogous to real-world turbulence. We compare the performance of our model with state-of-the-art probabilistic baselines, including a VAE and a diffusion model. We demonstrate that our Gaussian process-based closure outperforms these baselines in capturing first and second moment statistics in this particular test bed, providing robust and adaptive confidence intervals.