Amortized Posteriors for Estimation of Material Constitutive Parameters from Multimodal Measurements on Small Punch Tests
Bayesian calibration of material constitutive parameters from multimodal mechanical test data is often limited by the need to specify a joint likelihood across measurement modalities that differ in dimensionality, noise structure, and physical units. The resulting posteriors are often broad or strongly correlated, causing standard Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers to mix poorly. Here, we present an amortized, likelihood-free framework that combines Gaussian process (GP) surrogates with Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) to learn conditional posteriors over constitutive parameters directly from synthetic multimodal parameter--observation pairs, avoiding hand-crafted likelihoods and repeated MCMC sampling. Once trained, the GP--CFM model generates posterior samples for each new specimen at negligible cost. The utility of this novel approach is demonstrated in this paper by estimating the values of Young's modulus and yield strength from the early portion of the force--displacement ($F$--$D$) curve and a Digital Image Correlation (DIC)-based displacement field measured in a Small Punch Test (SPT). It is observed that the $F$--$D$ data alone produce broad posteriors, consistent with limited parameter discrimination in the global response. Adding the DIC-measured displacement field was seen to contract the posteriors and shift them towards the independently measured tensile reference values. This work establishes a robust likelihood-free framework for the inference of material constitutive parameters from multimodal data, demonstrated through SPT--DIC integration.