Neptuna: A Comprehensive Machine Learning Framework for Benchmarking Complex Multiphase Flows
physics.flu-dyn, cs.AI
Submitted: 2026-07-24
Updated: 2026-10-18
Comments: Accepted at NeurIPS-2026 (Evaluations and Datasets Track)
Project page: https://tumaer.github.io/Neptuna
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Compressible multiphase flows involving shocks and material interfaces arise in applications such as bubble collapse and droplet breakup, where strong nonlinear interactions produce complex interface
Terminology
Abstract
Compressible multiphase flows involving shocks and material interfaces arise in applications such as bubble collapse and droplet breakup, where strong nonlinear interactions produce complex interface deformation, mixing, and multiscale dynamics. Developing reliable machine learning surrogates for these flows remains challenging due to the simultaneous presence of compressibility, sharp discontinuities, and multiphase effects. In this work, we introduce the first large-scale benchmark specifically designed for shock-driven compressible multiphase flows, comprising 3 TB of high-fidelity 2D and 3D datasets featuring shock-induced bubble collapse and droplet breakup. We evaluate diverse surrogate model families on our benchmarking framework: Neptuna, including convolutional, spectral, transformer-based, and pre-trained PDE foundation models. Beyond standard MSE training, we investigate composite losses that combine MSE with Sobolev, interface-aware, and structure-aware terms, along with adaptive loss balancing using SoftAdapt and GradNorm. Evaluation includes pointwise, spectral, feature-focused, structural, and physics-informed metrics. Results show that no single model performs best across all datasets and metrics, while composite losses significantly improve interface preservation and spectral fidelity. Among adaptive weighting strategies, SoftAdapt provides the most consistent improvements with almost no overhead compared to MSE-only training. The benchmarking repository and the dataset are made available at
Sources
- Layer Normalization
- Message Passing Neural PDE Solvers
- Sobolev Training for Operator Learning
- A generalised novel loss function for computational fluid dynamics
- Towards Multi-spatiotemporal-scale Generalized PDE Modeling
- DPOT: Auto-Regressive Denoising Operator Transformer for Large-Scale PDE Pre-Training
- BubbleML: A Multi-Physics Dataset and Benchmarks for Machine Learning
- SoftAdapt: Techniques for Adaptive Loss Weighting of Neural Networks with Multi-Part Loss Functions
- RealPDEBench: A Benchmark for Complex Physical Systems with Real-World Data
- Physics-Informed Neural Operator for Learning Partial Differential Equations
- Benchmarking neural surrogates on realistic spatiotemporal multiphysics flows
- Understanding SSIM
- Wavelet-based Loss for High-frequency Interface Dynamics
- Factorized Fourier Neural Operators
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