Learned multiphysics inversion with differentiable programming and machine learning

We present the Seismic Laboratory for Imaging and Modeling/Monitoring open-source software framework for computational geophysics and, more generally, inverse problems involving the wave equation (e.g., seismic and medical ultrasound), regularization with learned priors, and learned neural surrogates for multiphase flow simulations. By integrating multiple layers of abstraction, the software is designed to be both readable and scalable, allowing researchers to easily formulate problems in an abstract fashion while exploiting the latest developments in high-performance computing. The design principles and their benefits are illustrated and demonstrated by means of building a scalable prototype for permeability inversion from time-lapse crosswell seismic data, which, aside from coupling of wave physics and multiphase flow, involves machine learning.