PhySense: Sensor Placement Optimization for Accurate Physics Sensing

Yuezhou Ma (School of Software, Tsinghua University) · Haixu Wu (MIT CSAIL) · Hang Zhou (Tsinghua University, Tsinghua University) · Huikun Weng (Tsinghua University) · Jianmin Wang (Tsinghua University) · Mingsheng Long (Tsinghua University)

3d geometry datasetcross-attention mechanismdeep learning advancementsflow-based generative modelinformative sensor placementsmutual enhancementphysics sensingprojected gradient descentsensor placement optimizationsparse-data reconstructionspatial constraints state-of-the-art accuracy theoretical guarantees two-stage frameworkvariance-minimization principles

Physics sensing plays a central role in many scientific and engineering domains, which inherently involves two coupled tasks: reconstructing dense physical fields from sparse observations and optimizing scattered sensor placements to observe maximum information. While deep learning has made rapid advances in sparse-data reconstruction, existing methods generally omit optimization of sensor placements, leaving the mutual enhancement between reconstruction and placement on the shelf. To change this suboptimal practice, we propose PhySense, a synergistic two-stage framework that learns to jointly reconstruct physical fields and to optimize sensor placements, both aiming for accurate physics sensing. The first stage involves a flow-based generative model enhanced by cross-attention to adaptively fuse sparse observations. Leveraging the reconstruction feedback, the second stage performs sensor placement via projected gradient descent to satisfy spatial constraints. We further prove that the learning objectives of the two stages are consistent with classical variance-minimization principles, providing theoretical guarantees. Extensive experiments across three challenging benchmarks, especially a 3D geometry dataset, indicate PhySense achieves state-of-the-art physics sensing accuracy and discovers informative sensor placements previously unconsidered. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/thuml/PhySense.