Mosaic: A Benchmark Suite for Differentiable Physics Solvers

원문 초록

Differentiable partial differential equation (PDE) solvers underpin solver-in-the-loop MLtraining, gradient-based optimal control, and inverse problems, yet the practical cost of obtaining correct, usable gradients from a given solver on a given problem is largely undocumented. Integration effort, computational cost, memory, gradient accuracy, and numerical stability vary widely across solvers and are discoverable only by trial and error. We introduce Mosaic, an extensible benchmarking framework for differentiable PDE solvers that standardizes access to solver gradients. Each solver is packaged as a containerized component (Tesseract) exposing a uniform gradient API regardless of language or automatic differentiation (AD) strategy, enabling researchers to evaluate, compare, and build on non-trivial physical solvers. Our evaluation of 14 solvers across fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, and heat transfer demonstrates that the benchmark surfaces practically relevant differences: order-of-magnitude variation in computational cost and memory, alongside setup incompatibilities and instabilities that rule out solvers for specific tasks. Despite this variation, all solvers that produce gradients converge to similar optima on our tasks, indicating that the practical barriers are memory limits, numerical stability, and setup compatibility rather than gradient accuracy alone. Mosaic is open-source and available at github.com/pasteurlabs/mosaic.