LaDEEP: A Deep Learning-based Surrogate Model for Large Deformation of Elastic-Plastic Solids

Abstract

Scientific computing for large deformation of elastic-plastic solids is critical for numerous real-world applications. Classical numerical solvers rely primarily on local discrete linear approximation and are constrained by an inherent trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Recently, deep learning models have achieved impressive progress in solving the continuum mechanism. While previous models have explored various architectures and constructed coefficient-solution mappings, they are designed for general instances without considering specific problem properties and hard to accurately handle with complex elastic-plastic solids involving contact, loading and unloading. In this work, we take stretch bending, a popular metal fabrication technique, as our case study and introduce LaDEEP, a deep learning-based surrogate model for \textbf{La}rge \textbf{De}formation of \textbf{E}lastic-\textbf{P}lastic Solids. We encode the partitioned regions of the involved slender solids into a token sequence to maintain their essential order property. To characterize the physical process of the solid deformation, a two-stage Transformer-based module is designed to predict the deformation with the sequence of tokens as input. Empirically, LaDEEP achieves five magnitudes faster speed than finite element methods with a comparable accuracy, and gains 20.47\% relative improvement on average compared to other deep learning baselines. We have also deployed our model into a real-world industrial production system, and it has shown remarkable performance in both accuracy and efficiency.

Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining V.2 (KDD '25)