arXiv subjects

Yimin Dou

Publications and source records attributed to Yimin Dou.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Artificial Intelligence for Subsurface Imaging Understanding: A Decade Review of Challenges, Methods, Benchmarks, and Outlook

Subsurface imaging interpretation bridges observed geophysical data and quantitative geological models, supporting hydrocarbon exploration, CO2 storage assessment, and geohazard monitoring. Over the past decade, machine learning and deep learning have substantially reshaped interpretation workflows. This review synthesizes the 2015-2025 literature across four tasks: structural interpretation, geobody identification, seismic facies analysis, and property estimation, tracing the field's evolution from classical machine learning through deep learning to emerging domain foundation models, and how these tasks couple within a single interpretation system. The task remains fundamentally different from other AI applications, facing ambiguous signals, interpretive non-uniqueness, sparse semantics, unfixed target locations, and scarce reliable annotations. We synthesize three defining challenges: interpretation under complex geological conditions, cross-survey semantic generalization under low information density, and the absence of reliable benchmarks. Addressing them will hinge on integrating human expertise, physical constraints, and geological priors into training and inference, and on treating uncertainty quantification as an intrinsic model output. We outline a forward-looking agenda: unified, jointly modelled interpretation systems with cross-task consistency; priors evolving from physics toward language and multimodal supervision; end-to-end uncertainty propagation; human-AI collaboration and agent-orchestrated workflows; and a more rigorous evaluation science supported by an AI-ready data ecosystem. The review is accompanied by an open benchmark resource (CIG-Bench), covering fault segmentation, relative geologic time estimation, geobody segmentation, and property modeling, with synthetic datasets, pretrained baselines, and quantitative evaluation: https://douyimin.github.io/CIG-bench

physics.geo-ph↗

arXiv2026

Implicit Structural Modeling via Generative Diffusion Frameworks

Implicit structural modeling can support understanding subsurface spatial configurations, revealing patterns of geological evolution, and enabling quantitative simulation of geological processes, thereby offering substantial scientific and engineering value. Conventional approaches formulate it as an optimization problem or framework interpolation to fit a continuous scalar field, whereas machine learning methods typically adopt discriminative regression to directly predict implicit models. However, in complex scenarios involving fault intersections, branching, and thrust nappes, these methods still struggle to maintain topological consistency and kinematic plausibility. In this work, we develop an implicit structural modeling approach based on diffusion models. We construct a set of training data through a simulation based synthesis pipeline and design a dedicated encoder for conditional injection, allowing the conditional branch to converge rapidly while effectively reinforcing the input conditional priors throughout the diffusion process, thereby more stably propagating structural constraints. We then inject these conditional features into a backbone network pretrained on large scale natural images to enable conditional training of the diffusion model. Although our synthetic data include only a relatively stylized normal fault system, experiments demonstrate strong generalization, enabling the model to effectively handle diverse complex structural types such as strike slip faults and intricate flower fault systems. More importantly, even in challenging thrust nappe settings where the scalar field becomes non monotonic and exhibits abrupt depth discontinuities, the model can still generate reliable implicit structural models.

physics.geo-ph↗

arXiv2026

Pretrain-to-alignment learning paradigm to improve geophysical AI applicability under scarce field labels and synthetic-to-field gaps: A case study of relative geologic time estimation in global shelf-edge clinothems

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been increasingly applied to various geophysical scenarios, yet its practical deployment remains limited by scarce field labels, pronounced synthetic-to-field domain gaps, and insufficient physical consistency under complex and variable field conditions. To address these challenges, we propose a pretrain-to-alignment learning paradigm that systematically integrates self-supervised pretraining, synthetic supervision, prior-driven refinement, and domain-adaptation fine-tuning into a unified progressive learning workflow. In this paradigm, geophysical AI models are developed through sequential stages that progressively build field-relevant representations, task-specific mapping capability, field consistency, and target-specific adaptability. We validate this paradigm using cross-survey relative geologic time (RGT) estimation in global shelf-edge clinothems as a representative case study. Results from 3,000 field datasets spanning multiple sedimentary basins demonstrate that the proposed paradigm achieves accurate, robust, and well-generalized performance across diverse field surveys, while significantly improving fine-scale stratigraphic and structural details. More broadly, this study provides a practical methodological reference for a broader range of geophysical AI tasks, such as interpretation, regression, and inversion problems.

physics.geo-ph↗

arXiv2026

GeoDecider: An Evidence-Grounded Agent for Geological Interpretation via Deliberative Reasoning

Geological interpretation infers subsurface properties and structures from indirect geophysical observations. Well-log classification provides a measurable setting by assigning geological classes to depth-indexed petrophysical records. The task is difficult because different subsurface units may exhibit similar logging responses, whereas accurate interpretation often depends on local measurements, depth-wise context, domain knowledge, and reasonable transitions between neighboring layers. Existing automated methods mainly follow fixed prediction pipelines, leaving little room to gather additional evidence for difficult samples. In this work, we propose GeoDecider, an evidence-grounded agent for deliberative geological interpretation. GeoDecider retains efficient numerical prediction as the first stage, then selectively invokes tool-assisted reasoning for difficult intervals. A lightweight classifier produces point-wise predictions and estimates sample difficulty from its prediction scores. High-difficulty points act as routing anchors, triggering interval-level analysis so that nearby observations can be examined together. For each activated interval, specialized tools build an Evidence Profile that summarizes geological knowledge, depth-wise trends, previous predictions from the same well, and similar cases retrieved from training wells. Three complementary scientific views generate candidate interpretations. GeoDecider compares their supporting evidence, resolves disagreements, then applies geology-informed checks on continuity, boundary cues, and petrophysical consistency. Experiments on four public well-log benchmarks show that GeoDecider consistently outperforms representative baselines, demonstrating the value of selective evidence gathering and deliberative reasoning for geological interpretation.~\footnote{Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/GeoDecider}

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Learning Stratigraphically Consistent Relative Geologic Time from 3D Seismic Data via Sinusoidal Mapping

Relative Geologic Time (RGT) estimation from seismic data is a cornerstone of subsurface structural modeling, depositional evolution analysis, and reservoir characterization, supporting horizon correlation and depositional system reconstruction. Yet accurate RGT estimation remains challenging: RGT is intrinsically a topologically constrained continuous field, in which local errors readily propagate globally and distort the overall result. Conventional methods rely heavily on priors, attribute extraction, and manual interaction, leading to cumbersome workflows. Existing deep-learning approaches mostly use a regression formulation with pixel-wise MSE/MAE losses, which struggle to capture thin horizons and fail to model the stratigraphic semantics of the RGT field, yielding limited generalization and unstable ordering across diverse structural and depositional settings. We propose RGT-Est, a deep-learning framework that transfers the optimization target from the topologically constrained continuous field into a differentiable sinusoidal space, which explicitly encodes the periodic stratigraphic semantics of RGT and alleviates over-smoothing of fine horizons. Pointwise, perceptual, and adversarial losses are jointly imposed in this space to enforce local fidelity, inter-layer consistency, and global structural plausibility, providing both fine-horizon discrimination and global stratigraphic awareness. An optional horizon-guidance module further accepts sparse 2D or 3D horizons as priors. Trained on synthetic data and evaluated on field surveys with densely faulted zones, large unconformities, steeply dipping strata, folded deformations, and clinoforms, RGT-Est achieves state-of-the-art performance among AI-based methods without horizon constraints, and attains substantially higher horizon-correlation accuracy and global topological consistency once sparse priors are incorporated.

physics.geo-ph↗

arXiv2025

Geological Everything Model 3D: A Promptable Foundation Model for Unified and Zero-Shot Subsurface Understanding

Understanding Earth's subsurface is critical for energy transition, natural hazard mitigation, and planetary science. Yet subsurface analysis remains fragmented, with separate models required for structural interpretation, stratigraphic analysis, geobody segmentation, and property modeling-each tightly coupled to specific data distributions and task formulations. We introduce the Geological Everything Model 3D (GEM), a unified generative architecture that reformulates all these tasks as prompt-conditioned inference along latent structural frameworks derived from subsurface imaging. This formulation moves beyond task-specific models by enabling a shared inference mechanism, where GEM propagates human-provided prompts-such as well logs, masks, or structural sketches-along inferred structural frameworks to produce geologically coherent outputs. Through this mechanism, GEM achieves zero-shot generalization across tasks with heterogeneous prompt types, without retraining for new tasks or data sources. This capability emerges from a two-stage training process that combines self-supervised representation learning on large-scale field seismic data with adversarial fine-tuning using mixed prompts and labels across diverse subsurface tasks. GEM demonstrates broad applicability across surveys and tasks, including Martian radar stratigraphy analysis, structural interpretation in subduction zones, full seismic stratigraphic interpretation, geobody segmentation, and property modeling. By bridging expert knowledge with generative reasoning in a structurally aware manner, GEM lays the foundation for scalable, human-in-the-loop geophysical AI-transitioning from fragmented pipelines to a vertically integrated, promptable reasoning system. Project page: https://douyimin.github.io/GEM

physics.geo-ph↗

arXiv2023

FaultSSL: Seismic Fault Detection via Semi-supervised learning

The prevailing methodology in data-driven fault detection leverages synthetic data for training neural networks. However, it grapples with challenges when it comes to generalization in surveys exhibiting complex structures. To enhance the generalization of models trained on limited synthetic datasets to a broader range of real-world data, we introduce FaultSSL, a semi-supervised fault detection framework. This method is based on the classical mean teacher structure, with its supervised part employs synthetic data and a few 2D labels. The unsupervised component relying on two meticulously devised proxy tasks, allowing it to incorporate vast unlabeled field data into the training process. The two proxy tasks are PaNning Consistency (PNC) and PaTching Consistency (PTC). PNC emphasizes the feature consistency of the overlapping regions between two adjacent views in predicting the model. This allows for the extension of 2D slice labels to the global seismic volume. PTC emphasizes the spatially consistent nature of faults. It ensures that the predictions for the seismic, whether made on the entire volume or on individual patches, exhibit coherence without any noticeable artifacts at the patch boundaries. While the two proxy tasks serve different objectives, they uniformly contribute to the enhancement of performance. Experiments showcase the exceptional performance of FaultSSL. In surveys where other mainstream methods fail to deliver, we present reliable, continuous, and clear detection results. FaultSSL breaks the shackles of synthetic data, unveiling a promising route for incorporating copious amounts of field data into training and fostering model generalization across a broader spectrum of surveys.

physics.geo-ph↗

arXiv2023

CONSS: Contrastive Learning Approach for Semi-Supervised Seismic Facies Classification

Recently, seismic facies classification based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) has garnered significant research interest. However, existing CNN-based supervised learning approaches necessitate massive labeled data. Labeling is laborious and time-consuming, particularly for 3D seismic data volumes. To overcome this challenge, we propose a semi-supervised method based on pixel-level contrastive learning, termed CONSS, which can efficiently identify seismic facies using only 1% of the original annotations. Furthermore, the absence of a unified data division and standardized metrics hinders the fair comparison of various facies classification approaches. To this end, we develop an objective benchmark for the evaluation of semi-supervised methods, including self-training, consistency regularization, and the proposed CONSS. Our benchmark is publicly available to enable researchers to objectively compare different approaches. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the F3 survey.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

ContrasInver: Ultra-Sparse Label Semi-supervised Regression for Multi-dimensional Seismic Inversion

The automated interpretation and inversion of seismic data have advanced significantly with the development of Deep Learning (DL) methods. However, these methods often require numerous costly well logs, limiting their application only to mature or synthetic data. This paper presents ContrasInver, a method that achieves seismic inversion using as few as two or three well logs, significantly reducing current requirements. In ContrasInver, we propose three key innovations to address the challenges of applying semi-supervised learning to regression tasks with ultra-sparse labels. The Multi-dimensional Sample Generation (MSG) technique pioneers a paradigm for sample generation in multi-dimensional inversion. It produces a large number of diverse samples from a single well, while establishing lateral continuity in seismic data. MSG yields substantial improvements over current techniques, even without the use of semi-supervised learning. The Region-Growing Training (RGT) strategy leverages the inherent continuity of seismic data, effectively propagating accuracy from closer to more distant regions based on the proximity of well logs. The Impedance Vectorization Projection (IVP) vectorizes impedance values and performs semi-supervised learning in a compressed space. We demonstrated that the Jacobian matrix derived from this space can filter out some outlier components in pseudo-label vectors, thereby solving the value confusion issue in semi-supervised regression learning. In the experiments, ContrasInver achieved state-of-the-art performance in the synthetic data SEAM I. In the field data with two or three well logs, only the methods based on the components proposed in this paper were able to achieve reasonable results. It's the first data-driven approach yielding reliable results on the Netherlands F3 and Delft, using only three and two well logs respectively.

physics.geo-ph↗

arXiv2022

MDA GAN: Adversarial-Learning-based 3-D Seismic Data Interpolation and Reconstruction for Complex Missing

The interpolation and reconstruction of missing traces is a crucial step in seismic data processing, moreover it is also a highly ill-posed problem, especially for complex cases such as high-ratio random discrete missing, continuous missing and missing in fault-rich or salt body surveys. These complex cases are rarely mentioned in current works. To cope with complex missing cases, we propose Multi-Dimensional Adversarial GAN (MDA GAN), a novel 3-D GAN framework. It keeps anisotropy and spatial continuity of the data after 3D complex missing reconstruction using three discriminators. The feature stitching module is designed and embedded in the generator to retain more information of the input data. The Tanh cross entropy (TCE) loss is derived, which provides the generator with the optimal reconstruction gradient to make the generated data smoother and continuous. We experimentally verified the effectiveness of the individual components of the study and then tested the method on multiple publicly available data. The method achieves reasonable reconstructions for up to 95% of random discrete missing and 100 traces of continuous missing. In fault and salt body enriched surveys, MDA GAN still yields promising results for complex cases. Experimentally it has been demonstrated that our method achieves better performance than other methods in both simple and complex cases.https://github.com/douyimin/MDA_GAN

physics.geo-ph↗

arXiv2021

MD Loss: Efficient Training of 3D Seismic Fault Segmentation Network under Sparse Labels by Weakening Anomaly Annotation

Data-driven fault detection has been regarded as a 3D image segmentation task. The models trained from synthetic data are difficult to generalize in some surveys. Recently, training 3D fault segmentation using sparse manual 2D slices is thought to yield promising results, but manual labeling has many false negative labels (abnormal annotations), which is detrimental to training and consequently to detection performance. Motivated to train 3D fault segmentation networks under sparse 2D labels while suppressing false negative labels, we analyze the training process gradient and propose the Mask Dice (MD) loss. Moreover, the fault is an edge feature, and current encoder-decoder architectures widely used for fault detection (e.g., U-shape network) are not conducive to edge representation. Consequently, Fault-Net is proposed, which is designed for the characteristics of faults, employs high-resolution propagation features, and embeds MultiScale Compression Fusion block to fuse multi-scale information, which allows the edge information to be fully preserved during propagation and fusion, thus enabling advanced performance via few computational resources. Experimental demonstrates that MD loss supports the inclusion of human experience in training and suppresses false negative labels therein, enabling baseline models to improve performance and generalize to more surveys. Fault-Net is capable to provide a more stable and reliable interpretation of faults, it uses extremely low computational resources and inference is significantly faster than other models. Our method indicates optimal performance in comparison with several mainstream methods.

cs.CV↗