Conditional Denoising Model as a Physical Surrogate Model
Abstract
Surrogate modeling for complex physical systems typically faces a trade-off between data-fitting accuracy and physical consistency. Physics-consistent approaches typically treat physical laws as soft constraints within the loss function, a strategy that frequently fails to guarantee strict adherence to the governing equations, or rely on post-processing corrections that do not intrinsically learn the underlying solution geometry. To address these limitations, we introduce the {Conditional Denoising Model (CDM)}, a generative model designed to learn the geometry of the physical manifold itself. By training the network to restore clean states from noisy ones, the model learns a vector field that points continuously towards the valid solution subspace. We introduce a time-independent formulation that transforms inference into a deterministic fixed-point iteration, effectively projecting noisy approximations onto the equilibrium manifold. Validated on a low-temperature plasma physics and chemistry benchmark, the CDM achieves higher parameter and data efficiency than physics-consistent baselines. Crucially, we demonstrate that the denoising objective acts as a powerful implicit regularizer: despite never seeing the governing equations during training, the model adheres to physical constraints more strictly than baselines trained with explicit physics losses.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.21021,
title = {Conditional Denoising Model as a Physical Surrogate Model},
author = {José Afonso and Pedro Viegas and Rodrigo Ventura and Vasco Guerra},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.21021},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
15 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables