Rafael Bischof

Vera M. Balmer, Sophia V. Kuhn, Rafael Bischof et al.

For conceptual design, engineers rely on conventional iterative (often manual) techniques. Emerging parametric models facilitate design space exploration based on quantifiable performance metrics, yet remain time-consuming and computationally expensive. Pure optimisation methods, however, ignore qualitative aspects (e.g. aesthetics or construction methods). This paper provides a performance-driven design exploration framework to augment the human designer through a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE), which serves as forward performance predictor for given design features as well as an inverse design feature predictor conditioned on a set of performance requests. The CVAE is trained on 18'000 synthetically generated instances of a pedestrian bridge in Switzerland. Sensitivity analysis is employed for explainability and informing designers about (i) relations of the model between features and/or performances and (ii) structural improvements under user-defined objectives. A case study proved our framework's potential to serve as a future co-pilot for conceptual design studies of pedestrian bridges and beyond.

Rafael Bischof, Florian Scheidegger, Michael A. Kraus et al.

Neural Image Classifiers are effective but inherently hard to interpret and susceptible to adversarial attacks. Solutions to both problems exist, among others, in the form of counterfactual examples generation to enhance explainability or adversarially augment training datasets for improved robustness. However, existing methods exclusively address only one of the issues. We propose a unified framework leveraging image-to-image translation Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to produce counterfactual samples that highlight salient regions for interpretability and act as adversarial samples to augment the dataset for more robustness. This is achieved by combining the classifier and discriminator into a single model that attributes real images to their respective classes and flags generated images as "fake". We assess the method's effectiveness by evaluating (i) the produced explainability masks on a semantic segmentation task for concrete cracks and (ii) the model's resilience against the Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) attack on a fruit defects detection problem. Our produced saliency maps are highly descriptive, achieving competitive IoU values compared to classical segmentation models despite being trained exclusively on classification labels. Furthermore, the model exhibits improved robustness to adversarial attacks, and we show how the discriminator's "fakeness" value serves as an uncertainty measure of the predictions.

Janne Perini, Rafael Bischof, Moab Arar et al.

Designing urban spaces that provide pedestrian wind comfort and safety requires time-resolved Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations, but their current computational cost makes extensive design exploration impractical. We introduce WinDiNet (Wind Diffusion Network), a pretrained video diffusion model that is repurposed as a fast, differentiable surrogate for this task. Starting from LTX-Video, a 2B-parameter latent video transformer, we fine-tune on 10,000 2D incompressible CFD simulations over procedurally generated building layouts. A systematic study of training regimes, conditioning mechanisms, and VAE adaptation strategies, including a physics-informed decoder loss, identifies a configuration that outperforms purpose-built neural PDE solvers. The resulting model generates full 112-frame rollouts in under a second. As the surrogate is end-to-end differentiable, it doubles as a physics simulator for gradient-based inverse optimization: given an urban footprint layout, we optimize building positions directly through backpropagation to improve wind safety as well as pedestrian wind comfort. Experiments on single- and multi-inlet layouts show that the optimizer discovers effective layouts even under challenging multi-objective configurations, with all improvements confirmed by ground-truth CFD simulations.

Rafael Bischof, Michal Piovarči, Michael A. Kraus et al.

We present HyPINO, a multi-physics neural operator designed for zero-shot generalization across a broad class of PDEs without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. Our approach combines a Swin Transformer-based hypernetwork with mixed supervision: (i) labeled data from analytical solutions generated via the Method of Manufactured Solutions (MMS), and (ii) unlabeled samples optimized using physics-informed objectives. The model maps PDE parameterizations to target Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) and can handle linear elliptic, hyperbolic, and parabolic equations in two dimensions with varying source terms, geometries, and mixed Dirichlet/Neumann boundary conditions, including interior boundaries. HyPINO achieves strong zero-shot accuracy on seven benchmark problems from PINN literature, outperforming U-Nets, Poseidon, and Physics-Informed Neural Operators (PINO). Further, we introduce an iterative refinement procedure that treats the residual of the generated PINN as "delta PDE" and performs another forward pass to generate a corrective PINN. Summing their contributions and repeating this process forms an ensemble whose combined solution progressively reduces the error on six benchmarks and achieves a >100x lower $L_2$ loss in the best case, while retaining forward-only inference. Additionally, we evaluate the fine-tuning behavior of PINNs initialized by HyPINO and show that they converge faster and to lower final error than both randomly initialized and Reptile-meta-learned PINNs on five benchmarks, performing on par on the remaining two. Our results highlight the potential of this scalable approach as a foundation for extending neural operators toward solving increasingly complex, nonlinear, and high-dimensional PDE problems. The code and model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/rbischof/hypino.

Sophia V. Kuhn, Rafael Bischof, Marius Weber et al.

Aging infrastructure portfolios pose a critical resource allocation challenge: deciding which structures require intervention and which can safely remain in service. Structural assessments must balance the trade-off between cheaper, conservative analysis methods and accurate but costly simulations that do not scale portfolio-wide. We propose Bayesian neural network (BNN) surrogates for rapid structural pre-assessment of worldwide common bridge types, such as reinforced concrete frame bridges. Trained on a large-scale database of non-linear finite element analyses generated via a parametric pipeline and developed based on the Swiss Federal Railway's bridge portfolio, the models accurately and efficiently estimate high-fidelity structural analysis results by predicting code compliance factors with calibrated epistemic uncertainty. Our BNN surrogate enables fast, uncertainty-aware triage: flagging likely critical structures and providing guidance where refined analysis is pertinent. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in a real-world case study of a railway underpass, showing its potential to significantly reduce costs and emissions by avoiding unnecessary analyses and physical interventions across entire infrastructure portfolios.

Rafael Bischof, Michael Kraus

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINN) are algorithms from deep learning leveraging physical laws by including partial differential equations together with a respective set of boundary and initial conditions as penalty terms into their loss function. In this work, we observe the significant role of correctly weighting the combination of multiple competitive loss functions for training PINNs effectively. To this end, we implement and evaluate different methods aiming at balancing the contributions of multiple terms of the PINNs loss function and their gradients. After reviewing of three existing loss scaling approaches (Learning Rate Annealing, GradNorm and SoftAdapt), we propose a novel self-adaptive loss balancing scheme for PINNs named \emph{ReLoBRaLo} (Relative Loss Balancing with Random Lookback). We extensively evaluate the performance of the aforementioned balancing schemes by solving both forward as well as inverse problems on three benchmark PDEs for PINNs: Burgers' equation, Kirchhoff's plate bending equation and Helmholtz's equation. The results show that ReLoBRaLo is able to consistently outperform the baseline of existing scaling methods in terms of accuracy, while also inducing significantly less computational overhead.