Escaping Geological Generative Prior Distributions in Bayesian Travel Time Tomography

Abstract

Solutions to geophysical inverse problems are generally non-unique, and greatly benefit from additional geological prior information. Generative Neural Networks (GNNs) are commonly used to parametrise such information, typically restricting solutions to a lower-dimensional latent space. The final inversion result is obtained by mapping the latent space parameters to the original higher-dimensional model space using the GNNs. However, solutions then remain confined to a low-dimensional geological generative manifold; if the true Earth model lies outside of this manifold, standard latent space inversion fails. We propose a Bayesian model space inversion method that uses the generative manifold as a guide to find the solutions that lie outside this manifold. We validate our approach in non-linear travel-time tomography experiments on both simple and more geological structures. By comparing our method with model space inversion using uniform prior probabilities and standard latent-space inversion, we demonstrate that the less informative uniform prior fails to constrain the solution, while the latent space approach fails when the true Earth model lies outside of the generative manifold. Conversely, our new model-space inversion method successfully recovers complex off-manifold geological features while maintaining low solution uncertainty.