Physics sensing in evolving environments requires reconstructing dense spatiotemporal fields from sparse observations while adapting where future observations should be collected. Existing reconstruction and sensor-placement methods have made substantial progress, but they typically rely on static sensing assumptions: they either use a single layout across all frames or optimize placements independently at each frame, which limits their ability to produce temporally coherent sensing trajectories. We introduce DyPSI, a dynamic physics sensing framework that formulates this problem as the joint generation of future fields and sensor trajectories conditioned on historical observations. DyPSI lifts discrete sensor coordinates into continuous Sensor Position Fields, encodes fields and sensing configurations with a shared Functional Tucker representation, and trains a joint diffusion model to generate future fields and sensing trajectories simultaneously in the resulting latent space. A Gaussian-process temporal kernel correlates the perturbation injected during diffusion training, biasing the denoiser toward temporally smooth recoveries, and we further provide an analysis linking the EDM training objective to a sequence-aggregated A-optimality criterion and a kernel-induced bound on discrete trajectory variation. Experiments on turbulent flow, GLORYS12 sea-surface temperature, and 3D car aerodynamics show that DyPSI consistently outperforms static and frame-wise placement strategies, with substantial error reduction under tight sensor budgets. The code is available at https://github.com/mengqi132/DyPSI.
Yifan Sun, Panqi Chen, Weifeng Shi, Xiao Fu, Lei Cheng
Reconstructing three-dimensional (3D) complex ocean acoustic fields from sparse measurements is challenging due to highly oscillatory wave structures and restricted sensing patterns/routes. Learning-based approaches fall into two categories. First, purely data-driven models can learn complex field patterns, but do not explicitly exploit wave physics that may enhance interpretability and reduce training costs. Second, physics-informed methods impose a specified physical equation as a reconstruction constraint, but often require environment-dependent parameters that are difficult to acquire. As a result, practical 3D acoustic field reconstruction that is both physically grounded and robust to uncertain environmental information remains largely unexplored. This work takes an alternative route: instead of solving a fully specified wave equation, it extracts a structured representation from wave physics and learns its components from data. From the Helmholtz equation and normal mode propagation, we derive a structured spatial-angular tensor representation, termed the S/c representation. Under a low-rank specialization, it takes the form of a rank-(L,L,1) block-term tensor decomposition, which connects structured sampling patterns/routes used in ocean sensing to sufficient conditions for field recovery. Building on this tensor representation, we propose TIDAL, a neural reconstructor that uses the S/c representation as an inductive bias for structured decoding and aligns information aggregation with the sampling geometry. The neural learner removes the need for known model parameters required by conventional physics-based recovery methods. Experiments across three structured sampling geometries show that TIDAL achieves the best reconstruction performance and fastest inference among baselines, with benefits from the physics-derived representation under limited data and model capacity.
Panqi Chen, Yifan Sun, Shikai Fang, Xiao Fu, Lei Cheng
Inferring the evolution of high-dimensional and multi-modal (e.g., spatio-temporal) physical fields from irregular sparse measurements in real time is a fundamental challenge in science and engineering. Existing approaches, including diffusion-based generative models and functional tensor methods, typically operate in offline settings, depend on full temporal observations, or incur substantial inference cost. We propose StreamPhy, an end-to-end framework that enables efficient and accurate streaming inference of full-field physical dynamics from incoming irregular sparse measurements. The framework integrates a data-adaptive observation encoder that is robust to arbitrary observation patterns, a structured state-space model that supports memory-efficient online updates across irregular time intervals, and an expressive Functional Tensor Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FT-FiLM) decoder for continuous-field generation. We prove that FT-FiLM is more expressive than the functional Tucker model, admitting a richer function class for handling complex dynamics. Experiments on three representative physical systems under challenging sampling patterns show that StreamPhy consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with at least 48\% improvement in accuracy and up to 20--100X faster inference than diffusion-based methods.