Post-FWI Injection of Learned Priors Using a Flow Matching Model

Abstract

Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) is a powerful tool for subsurface velocity reconstruction but remains highly ill-posed, sensitive to acquisition limitations, often requiring some form of regularization to reduce artifacts and enhance resolution. While recent developments have shown that generative models can inject learned priors directly into the FWI optimization process, such approaches typically require additional, computationally expensive inversion iterations. In this study, we propose a post-FWI refinement strategy based on a Flow Matching (FM) generative model, which leverages learned geological priors without re-running FWI. The method guides the deterministic generative process using the FWI result, as well as well logs, if available. Synthetic and field data experiments demonstrate that we can inject well information and our geological expectations (prior) into the provided FWI result, and thus, we can effectively enhance its resolution and geological quality. In fact, the well prior even managed to alter the model depth to fit the well information, which is a form of correcting for depth misties.