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This study explores the use of a pretrained generative image-editing model as a unified interface for numerical simulations across various physical phenomena. By integrating physical inputs and outputs as images with lightweight adapters for scalar quantities, the authors demonstrate that the model can effectively represent a range of complex physical mappings, including unstable dynamics and shock-like behavior. However, the research also reveals limitations in accurately simulating chaotic systems due to representation errors and challenges in enforcing governing equations.
A pretrained image-editing model can serve as a versatile tool for simulating complex physical systems, but it struggles with chaotic dynamics due to inherent representation errors.
We investigate whether a pretrained generative image-editing model can provide a common interface for numerical simulation. Physical inputs and solutions are rendered as images, while scalar quantities such as material properties, diffusivity, and loading parameters enter through lightweight adapters. Using established numerical and analytic solvers for supervision, we apply the same architecture and training protocol to heterogeneous elliptic equations, forced heat and Burgers evolution, complex Ginzburg-Landau dynamics, two-dimensional Navier-Stokes prediction, potential flow, elasticity, eikonal travel time, phase-field fracture, and entropic optimal transport. The results show that a pretrained image model can represent diverse static and time-dependent physical mappings, including unstable and shock-like behavior, when each task is expressed through a suitable visual encoding. This work is a capability study rather than an attempt to surpass specialized solvers. It also identifies fundamental constraints: image and latent representations complicate numerical range selection and direct enforcement of governing equations or invariants, while a failed Kuramoto-Sivashinsky experiment indicates that representation errors prevent meaningful long-horizon simulation of chaotic systems.