Unsupervised Posterior Sampling for Seismic Data Recovery via Score-Based Generative Priors

TL;DR

This paper introduces an unsupervised framework using score-based generative models for seismic data restoration, enabling effective recovery across various degradation types without retraining.

Contribution

It presents a novel posterior sampling framework that leverages pre-trained SGMs as a universal prior for multiple seismic inverse problems without supervision.

Findings

High-quality seismic denoising and interpolation achieved

Robust generalization to out-of-distribution data demonstrated

Flexible adaptation to different noise levels and degradation conditions

Abstract

Seismic data restoration is a fundamental task in seismic exploration, yet remains challenging under complex and unknown degradations. Traditional model-driven or task-specific learning methods often require retraining for each degradation type and fail to generalize effectively to unseen field data. In this work, we introduce an unsupervised Posterior Sampling Framework (PSF) built upon Score-based Generative Models (SGMs) for unified seismic data restoration. PSF leverages the pre-trained unconditional SGMs as a seismic-aware generative prior and derives a generalized conditional score function associated with the forward operator of each inverse problem. This enables posterior sampling across different seismic restoration tasks without retraining or supervision. Additionally, an adaptive noise-level estimation mechanism is incorporated to dynamically regulate the noise suppression strength during sampling, enhancing flexibility under varying signal-to-noise ratios and degradation conditions.Extensive experiments on seismic denoising, interpolation, compressed sensing, and deconvolution demonstrate that PSF delivers high-quality samples and exhibits robust generalization to out-of-distribution data. These results highlight the potential of SGMs as a universal prior for seismic inverse problems and establish PSF as a flexible framework for unsupervised posterior inference across diverse degradation scenarios.