Offline Reinforcement Learning for Fluid Controls: Data-based Multi-observational Policy Extraction

Deepak Akhare, Luning Sun, Xin-Yang Liu, Xiantao Fan, Timo Bremer, Ben Zhu, Jian-Xun Wang

Active flow control is a fundamental application in engineering. Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have made progress in this field. However, the classical online RL approaches require extensive real-time interactions with the high fidelity environment, while each sensor configuration change necessitates whole policy retraining. All these factors result in prohibitive computational costs for real-world applications. In this work, we propose a novel offline RL framework that addresses both challenges through data-driven policy extraction. We develop a sensor position-conditioned architecture that enables a single policy network to adapt seamlessly to multiple sensor arrangements. The position-conditioned approach incorporated spatial relationship modeling through Point Attention layers to ensure the generalizability to varying sensor placements. We demonstrate the framework on two representative problems, mitigating chaoticity in the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation and flow control over airfoils governed by the Navier-Stokes equation. The result demonstrates that the policy extraction from the dataset provides unprecedented flexibility for sensor placement optimization. This approach represents a significant step towards adaptive, intelligent flow control systems.