APIC: Amortized Physics-Informed Calibration using Neural Processes
Aishwarya Venkataramanan, Sai Karthikeya Vemuri, Joachim Denzler
Abstract
Physics models are inherently imperfect due to misspecified or missing mechanisms, resulting in systematic discrepancies between model predictions and real-world observations. The Kennedy-O'Hagan (KOH) framework addresses this issue through explicit discrepancy modeling. However, its non-amortized, per-instance formulation limits scalability across families of related systems. We introduce Amortized Physics-Informed Calibration (APIC), a population-level extension of KOH that leverages Neural Processes to perform scalable Bayesian inference across realizations. Our framework employs a two-branch latent architecture to disentangle instance-specific physical parameters from shared, state-dependent structural discrepancies. By integrating differentiable physics into an amortized inference backbone, APIC enables rapid calibration of unseen realizations from sparse observations while quantifying uncertainty. Experiments on the damped spring oscillator, the Lotka-Volterra system, and the advection-diffusion PDE with misspecified physics demonstrate improved parameter recovery and consistent identification of the systemic discrepancy structure compared to other calibration approaches.
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