Cosmological N-body simulations: a challenge for scalable generative models
This work addresses the computational expense of cosmological simulations for researchers, though it is incremental as it extends existing GAN methods to 3D data with a new benchmark.
The authors tackled the challenge of generating large-scale 3D cosmological N-body simulations using generative models, proposing a scalable GAN approach that splits data generation and uses multi-scale features, resulting in samples of high visual quality but with difficulties capturing rare features as shown by statistical analysis.
Deep generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or Variational Autoencoders (VAs) have been demonstrated to produce images of high visual quality. However, the existing hardware severely limits the size of the images that can be generated. The rapid growth of high dimensional data in many fields of science therefore poses a significant challenge for generative models. In cosmology, the large-scale, three-dimensional matter distribution, modeled with N-body simulations, plays a crucial role in understanding the evolution of the universe. As these simulations are computationally very expensive, GANs have recently generated interest as a possible method to emulate these datasets, but they have been, so far, mostly limited to two dimensional data. In this work, we introduce a new benchmark for the generation of three dimensional N-body simulations, in order to stimulate new ideas in the machine learning community and move closer to the practical use of generative models in cosmology. As a first benchmark result, we propose a scalable GAN approach for training a generator of N-body three-dimensional cubes. Our technique relies on two key building blocks, (i) splitting the generation of the high-dimensional data into smaller parts, and (ii) using a multi-scale approach that efficiently captures global image features that might otherwise be lost in the splitting process. We evaluate the performance of our model for the generation of N-body samples using various statistical measures commonly used in cosmology. Our results show that the proposed model produces samples of high visual quality, although the statistical analysis reveals that capturing rare features in the data poses significant problems for the generative models. We make the data, quality evaluation routines, and the proposed GAN architecture publicly available at https://github.com/nperraud/3DcosmoGAN