A reduced-order derivative-informed neural operator for subsurface fluid-flow
This work addresses a bottleneck in permeability inversion and uncertainty quantification for subsurface fluid-flow, offering a scalable solution for real-world applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing neural operator methods.
The paper tackled the computational expense of incorporating Jacobians in neural operators for subsurface fluid-flow tasks by proposing DeFINO, a reduced-order derivative-informed training framework, which demonstrated improved gradient accuracy and reduced computational cost in synthetic experiments.
Neural operators have emerged as cost-effective surrogates for expensive fluid-flow simulators, particularly in computationally intensive tasks such as permeability inversion from time-lapse seismic data, and uncertainty quantification. In these applications, the fidelity of the surrogate's gradients with respect to system parameters is crucial, as the accuracy of downstream tasks, such as optimization and Bayesian inference, relies directly on the quality of the derivative information. Recent advances in physics-informed methods have leveraged derivative information to improve surrogate accuracy. However, incorporating explicit Jacobians can become computationally prohibitive, as the complexity typically scales quadratically with the number of input parameters. To address this limitation, we propose DeFINO (Derivative-based Fisher-score Informed Neural Operator), a reduced-order, derivative-informed training framework. DeFINO integrates Fourier neural operators (FNOs) with a novel derivative-based training strategy guided by the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM). By projecting Jacobians onto dominant eigen-directions identified by the FIM, DeFINO captures critical sensitivity information directly informed by observational data, significantly reducing computational expense. We validate DeFINO through synthetic experiments in the context of subsurface multi-phase fluid-flow, demonstrating improvements in gradient accuracy while maintaining robust forward predictions of underlying fluid dynamics. These results highlight DeFINO's potential to offer practical, scalable solutions for inversion problems in complex real-world scenarios, all at substantially reduced computational cost.