Large Geometry Models Are Priors For Fast Physics Pretraining

Abstract

Language and vision models became data-efficient by pretraining on plentiful unlabelled data; physical field models have such data, over ten million 3D shapes, but geometry pretraining designs its targets rather than deriving them from the physics. Euler-Lagrange geometry pretraining derives them: for attached flow, a shape enters the flow's Euler-Lagrange equation only through coefficients that distance and normal line (the normal up to sign) fix to first order. Their reconstruction error therefore bounds what a representation loses about any field, and fine-tuning on costly simulations need only assemble the global field. We realise it in AREALS, a masked surface autoencoder whose areal tokens carry position, normal and area, pretrained self-supervised and sign-free on 61,822 raw meshes. Because the operating condition enters only through the far field, sensors can supply it: AREALS completes a hidden field in one forward pass without condition labels. It matches the accuracy of the same architecture trained from scratch with half the simulations on DrivAerML and DrivAerNet++ and about a quarter on WindsorML. On DoubleDelta wings, 20 sensors give $3.9\times$ and $4.0\times$ lower field and force error than GABI, a Bayesian inversion method with a learned prior, and beyond the training angles pretraining halves the error.