Comparative Study of Canvas- and Coordinate-Based Geometry-Conditioned Neural Networks for Real-Time Prediction of Indoor Environments with Varying Room Dimensions

arXiv:2610.15885v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is computationally expensive for iterative building design. Deep learning surrogates offer faster predictions, but generalization across varying room dimensions remains challenging. This study compares two geometry-conditioned neural network surrogate models for rapid indoor airflow and temperature field prediction under varying room sizes. During the architectural design stage, this method is relevant for real-time assessment of whether conditioned supply air will effectively provide fresh and cool air throughout rooms with varying heights and lengths. The canvas-based neural network (CaNN) explicitly encodes room size by preserving different occupied regions within a fixed canvas, whereas the coordinate-based neural network (CoNN) uses normalized coordinate channels. Both employ U-Net autoencoders to separately predict airflow and temperature fields. Evaluation uses simplified rooms with varying heights and lengths as a controlled benchmark. The results show that CaNN achieves higher agreement with CFD results than CoNN, demonstrating its potential to support performance-driven building design.