Physics-aware generative models for turbulent fluid flows through energy-consistent stochastic interpolants

Generative models have demonstrated remarkable success in domains such as text, image, and video synthesis. In this work, we explore the application of generative models to fluid dynamics, specifically for turbulence simulation, where classical numerical solvers are computationally expensive. We propose a novel stochastic generative model based on stochastic interpolants, which enables probabilistic forecasting while incorporating physical constraints such as energy stability and divergence-freeness. Unlike conventional stochastic generative models, which are often agnostic to underlying physical laws, our approach embeds energy consistency in a soft manner by making the parameters of the stochastic interpolant learnable coefficients. We evaluate our method on a benchmark turbulence problem – Kolmogorov flow – demonstrating superior accuracy and stability over state-of-the-art alternatives such as autoregressive conditional diffusion models (ACDMs) and PDE-Refiner. Furthermore, we achieve stable results for significantly longer roll-outs than standard stochastic interpolants. Our results highlight the potential of physics-aware generative models in accelerating and enhancing turbulence simulations while preserving fundamental conservation properties. • Generative model for turbulence that respects physical laws using stochastic interpolants. • Optimize stochastic interpolant for energy-consistency and minimal transport cost. • Divergence-freeness with projection step in inference stage without additional training. • Stable inference beyond state-of-the-art results on Kolmogorov turbulent flow.