A Multimodal Conditional Mixture Model with Distribution-Level Physics Priors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a physics-informed multimodal conditional modeling framework using mixture density networks, effectively capturing complex physical behaviors while ensuring interpretability and physical consistency.

Contribution

It develops a novel mixture density network approach with physics-based regularization for modeling multimodal distributions in scientific systems.

Findings

Successfully models bifurcation phenomena in nonlinear systems

Achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art generative models

Ensures physical consistency and interpretability in multimodal predictions

Abstract

Many scientific and engineering systems exhibit intrinsically multimodal behavior arising from latent regime switching and non-unique physical mechanisms. In such settings, learning the full conditional distribution of admissible outcomes in a physically consistent and interpretable manner remains a challenge. While recent advances in machine learning have enabled powerful multimodal generative modeling, their integration with physics-constrained scientific modeling remains nontrivial, particularly when physical structure must be preserved or data are limited. This work develops a physics-informed multimodal conditional modeling framework based on mixture density representations. Mixture density networks (MDNs) provide an explicit and interpretable parameterization of multimodal conditional distributions. Physical knowledge is embedded through component-specific regularization terms that penalize violations of governing equations or physical laws. This formulation naturally accommodates non-uniqueness and stochasticity while remaining computationally efficient and amenable to conditioning on contextual inputs. The proposed framework is evaluated across a range of scientific problems in which multimodality arises from intrinsic physical mechanisms rather than observational noise, including bifurcation phenomena in nonlinear dynamical systems, stochastic partial differential equations, and atomistic-scale shock dynamics. In addition, the proposed method is compared with a conditional flow matching (CFM) model, a representative state-of-the-art generative modeling approach, demonstrating that MDNs can achieve competitive performance while offering a simpler and more interpretable formulation.