Risk-Aware Generative Inpainting for Optimized Design Editing of EV Battery Cooling Channels

Abstract

Cooling-channel layouts for electric-vehicle battery packs must deliver temperature uniformity and low pressure drop while maintaining a single continuous channel. In late-stage design, local modification is a practical way to improve performance while retaining established global features. Diffusion-based inpainting supports such local edits, but its stochastic nature produces different outcomes even for the same region. This raises a fundamental question: how should edit locations be selected when each modification's outcome is stochastic? We propose a risk-aware generative editing framework that selects edit locations by accounting for this variability. Rather than scoring each candidate location by a single expected improvement, the method estimates a distribution of outcomes from offline edit results evaluated with a CFD-trained surrogate, and ranks locations by a chosen risk level. A single trained model therefore supports different editing preferences at inference time, emphasizing either higher expected improvement or greater consistency, without retraining. The policy is evaluated against random editing in a held-out paired study across seven mask configurations. It improves the cooling-channel objective over random editing in most configurations, and the advantage holds under independent CFD verification of the edited designs. Varying the risk level reveals a consistent trade-off between mean improvement and run-to-run consistency, while the learned distribution is useful for ranking locations but should not be read as a calibrated probability distribution. Together, these results show that stochastic generative editing can be converted from a source of variability into a controllable design decision through risk-aware location selection: effective editing depends not only on how a design is modified, but also on where and how much outcome variability is acceptable.