Explorable INR: An Implicit Neural Representation for Ensemble Simulation Enabling Efficient Spatial and Parameter Exploration
This work addresses storage and computational bottlenecks for researchers in fields like cosmology and oceanology, offering a novel method for ensemble simulation analysis, though it is incremental in its application of existing techniques to a specific domain.
The authors tackled the challenge of high storage and computational demands in ensemble simulations by proposing Explorable INR, an implicit neural representation-based surrogate model that enables efficient point-based spatial queries and parameter exploration, significantly reducing computation and memory costs.
With the growing computational power available for high-resolution ensemble simulations in scientific fields such as cosmology and oceanology, storage and computational demands present significant challenges. Current surrogate models fall short in the flexibility of point- or region-based predictions as the entire field reconstruction is required for each parameter setting, hence hindering the efficiency of parameter space exploration. Limitations exist in capturing physical attribute distributions and pinpointing optimal parameter configurations. In this work, we propose Explorable INR, a novel implicit neural representation-based surrogate model, designed to facilitate exploration and allow point-based spatial queries without computing full-scale field data. In addition, to further address computational bottlenecks of spatial exploration, we utilize probabilistic affine forms (PAFs) for uncertainty propagation through Explorable INR to obtain statistical summaries, facilitating various ensemble analysis and visualization tasks that are expensive with existing models. Furthermore, we reformulate the parameter exploration problem as optimization tasks using gradient descent and KL divergence minimization that ensures scalability. We demonstrate that the Explorable INR with the proposed approach for spatial and parameter exploration can significantly reduce computation and memory costs while providing effective ensemble analysis.