Learning Incompressible 3D Flows from Sparse Samples: A Set Transformer Approach to Divergence-Free Kernel Fitting

Abstract

Recovering divergence-free velocity fields from sparse and corrupted observations requires reconciling physical consistency, expressive representations, and robustness to missing data. We introduce DFK-Former, a set-to-field transformer that reconstructs divergence-free velocity fields from sparse, noisy, and irregularly sampled 3D observations. The model is inherently invariant to the number and ordering of input samples and predicts the parameters of a divergence-free kernel representation, producing continuous, mesh-free velocity fields that satisfy incompressibility exactly by construction rather than approximately through soft constraints or projection operators. Unlike existing divergence-free kernel approaches, which estimate kernel coefficients via a separate optimization for each field, DFK-Former predicts these coefficients directly in a single forward pass. This eliminates costly iterative fitting while providing a learned prior that enables accurate reconstruction even when observations are insufficient to uniquely determine the field. To enhance representational power, we introduce adaptive and anisotropic divergence-free kernels that preserve exact incompressibility guarantees while capturing more complex flow structures. Extensive experiments across varying levels of sparsity, noise, and occlusion, including transfer to real Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) turbulence data, demonstrate substantial gains in both accuracy and efficiency. DFK-Former reduces endpoint error by up to 4.6x compared to per-field divergence-free-kernel optimization, while reconstructing each field in 7.5 ms instead of 9.8 s, yielding a speedup of more than three orders of magnitude. These results establish direct, feed-forward prediction of divergence-free kernel parameters as a practical and effective paradigm for physically consistent velocity-field reconstruction from sparse observations.