Distributed Proximal Stein Variational Gradient Descent Algorithm for Large-scale Bayesian Inference in Traveltime Tomography

Abstract

We present a distributed framework for large-scale Bayesian inverse problems governed by the eikonal equation, with a specific focus on seismic traveltime tomography. Traditional deterministic approaches often fail to provide the uncertainty quantification (UQ) necessary for ill-posed problems, while conventional Bayesian sampling methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) suffer from the curse of dimensionality and slow convergence in high-dimensional model spaces. The proposed framework addresses these challenges through a three-tier computational strategy. First, we utilize the Fast Marching Method (FMM) to solve the eikonal equation, ensuring high numerical accuracy. Second, we reformulate the global tomographic objective into a decentralized consensus form, allowing the inversion to be decomposed into independent subproblems solved in parallel via the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). This architecture eliminates the need for the explicit construction of large-scale sensitivity matrices, significantly reducing the memory footprint for 3D surveys. Finally, we integrate Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) within the ADMM workers to perform approximate posterior sampling. By evolving a set of model particles along a functional gradient direction that balances data-fitting forces with a repulsive kernel-based diversity force, we obtain an ensemble from which posterior summaries are computed. We derive a data-space Gauss-Newton update using the Woodbury matrix identity to further accelerate the particle evolution in large-scale 3D problems. Numerical experiments on complex 2D and 3D models demonstrate that the algorithm achieves stable convergence, produces high-fidelity velocity reconstructions, and provides posterior uncertainty maps.