Preprints
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-1087
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-1087
21 Apr 2026
 | 21 Apr 2026
Status: this preprint is open for discussion and under review for Geoscientific Model Development (GMD).

LFD (v1.0): Latent-Compression-Free Generative Diffusion with Geological Priors and Geophysical Regularization for Implicit Structural Modeling

Zhixiang Guo, Xinming Wu, Yimin Dou, Hui Gao, and Guillaume Caumon

Abstract. Diffusion models provide a promising way to model the distribution of implicit structural models, potentially improving generalization across surveys. However, existing diffusion Transformer pipelines scale poorly to high-dimensional geophysical data because noise- or velocity-prediction objectives are often unstable at large patch sizes, forcing the use of small patches that lead to long token sequences and high computational cost. To reduce computation, most approaches rely on Variational autoencoders (VAEs) and latent diffusion, but robust pretrained VAEs are scarce in geophysics, and enforcing geological priors in latent space is difficult. To address these scalability bottlenecks and the difficulty of enforcing geological priors in latent space, we propose Latent-Compression-Free Generative Diffusion (LFD) with Geological Priors and Geophysical Regularization for implicit structural modeling. Built on flow matching, LFD generates implicit structural models directly in the data space, enabling efficient large-patch Vision Transformer (ViT) inference and allowing fault/horizon constraints and geophysical regularization to be applied explicitly during generation. To strengthen structural conditioning, we design a structure-enhanced Transformer that injects horizon and fault embeddings at multiple layers. We further introduce two prior-guided losses: a horizon loss to match the generated models to the input horizons, and a fault-aware bending-energy term that regularizes smoothness while ignoring stencils across faults. By enforcing these priors directly in the data space, the model is effectively constrained to generate geologically reasonable structures. Experiments on both synthetic data and real surveys validate the effectiveness of LFD for prior-guided implicit structural modeling. Benefiting from large-patch inference, LFD generates a 512x512 model in 1.56 s on an NVIDIA H20 GPU. With relative positional encoding, LFD can be extended to higher resolutions via simple adaptation without retraining. Overall, LFD offers new insights into deploying diffusion models for high-dimensional geophysical data, enabling efficient generation with interpretable, prior-guided constraints.

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Zhixiang Guo, Xinming Wu, Yimin Dou, Hui Gao, and Guillaume Caumon

Status: open (until 16 Jun 2026)

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Zhixiang Guo, Xinming Wu, Yimin Dou, Hui Gao, and Guillaume Caumon
Zhixiang Guo, Xinming Wu, Yimin Dou, Hui Gao, and Guillaume Caumon
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Latest update: 21 Apr 2026
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Short summary
We present a fast way to generate subsurface structure models from seismic surveys while honoring known horizons and faults. Instead of compressing the data into a hidden representation, our method works directly with the original model values and applies geological constraints during generation. Tests on synthetic and real surveys show more realistic structures and efficient prediction, producing a 512 by 512 model in 1.56 seconds on an NVIDIA H20 graphics processing unit.
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