MAgNET: A Graph U-Net Architecture for Mesh-Based Simulations

In many cutting-edge applications, high-fidelity computational models prove too slow to be practical and are thus replaced by much faster surrogate models. Recently, deep learning techniques have become increasingly important in accelerating such predictions. However, they tend to falter when faced with larger and more complex problems. Therefore, this work introduces MAgNET: Multi-channel Aggregation Network, a novel geometric deep learning framework designed to operate on large-dimensional data of arbitrary structure (graph data). MAgNET is built upon the MAg (Multichannel Aggregation) operation, which generalizes the concept of multi-channel local operations in convolutional neural networks to arbitrary non-grid inputs. The MAg layers are interleaved with the proposed novel graph pooling/unpooling operations to form a graph U-Net architecture that is robust and can handle arbitrary complex meshes, efficiently performing supervised learning on large-dimensional graph-structured data. We demonstrate the predictive capabilities of MAgNET for several non-linear finite element simulations and provide open-source datasets and codes to facilitate future research.