Function-Space Decoupled Diffusion for Forward and Inverse Modeling in Carbon Capture and Storage

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Main Authors: Ju, Xin, Yao, Jiachen, Anandkumar, Anima, Benson, Sally M., Wen, Gege
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Ju, Xin
Yao, Jiachen
Anandkumar, Anima
Benson, Sally M.
Wen, Gege
author_facet Ju, Xin
Yao, Jiachen
Anandkumar, Anima
Benson, Sally M.
Wen, Gege
contents Accurate characterization of subsurface flow is critical for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) but remains challenged by the ill-posed nature of inverse problems with sparse observations. We present Function-space Decoupled Diffusion Posterior Sampling (Fun-DDPS), a generative framework that combines function-space diffusion models with differentiable neural operator surrogates for both forward and inverse modeling. Our approach learns a prior distribution over geological parameters (geomodel) using a single-channel diffusion model, then leverages a Local Neural Operator (LNO) surrogate to provide physics-consistent guidance for cross-field conditioning on the dynamics field. This decoupling allows the diffusion prior to robustly recover missing information in parameter space, while the surrogate provides efficient gradient-based guidance for data assimilation. We demonstrate Fun-DDPS on synthetic CCS modeling datasets, achieving two key results: (1) For forward modeling with only 25% observations, Fun-DDPS achieves 7.7% relative error compared to 86.9% for standard surrogates (an 11x improvement), proving its capability to handle extreme data sparsity where deterministic methods fail. (2) We provide the first rigorous validation of diffusion-based inverse solvers against asymptotically exact Rejection Sampling (RS) posteriors. Both Fun-DDPS and the joint-state baseline (Fun-DPS) achieve Jensen-Shannon divergence less than 0.06 against the ground truth. Crucially, Fun-DDPS produces physically consistent realizations free from the high-frequency artifacts observed in joint-state baselines, achieving this with 4x improved sample efficiency compared to rejection sampling.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_12274
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Function-Space Decoupled Diffusion for Forward and Inverse Modeling in Carbon Capture and Storage
Ju, Xin
Yao, Jiachen
Anandkumar, Anima
Benson, Sally M.
Wen, Gege
Machine Learning
Geophysics
Accurate characterization of subsurface flow is critical for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) but remains challenged by the ill-posed nature of inverse problems with sparse observations. We present Function-space Decoupled Diffusion Posterior Sampling (Fun-DDPS), a generative framework that combines function-space diffusion models with differentiable neural operator surrogates for both forward and inverse modeling. Our approach learns a prior distribution over geological parameters (geomodel) using a single-channel diffusion model, then leverages a Local Neural Operator (LNO) surrogate to provide physics-consistent guidance for cross-field conditioning on the dynamics field. This decoupling allows the diffusion prior to robustly recover missing information in parameter space, while the surrogate provides efficient gradient-based guidance for data assimilation. We demonstrate Fun-DDPS on synthetic CCS modeling datasets, achieving two key results: (1) For forward modeling with only 25% observations, Fun-DDPS achieves 7.7% relative error compared to 86.9% for standard surrogates (an 11x improvement), proving its capability to handle extreme data sparsity where deterministic methods fail. (2) We provide the first rigorous validation of diffusion-based inverse solvers against asymptotically exact Rejection Sampling (RS) posteriors. Both Fun-DDPS and the joint-state baseline (Fun-DPS) achieve Jensen-Shannon divergence less than 0.06 against the ground truth. Crucially, Fun-DDPS produces physically consistent realizations free from the high-frequency artifacts observed in joint-state baselines, achieving this with 4x improved sample efficiency compared to rejection sampling.
title Function-Space Decoupled Diffusion for Forward and Inverse Modeling in Carbon Capture and Storage
topic Machine Learning
Geophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12274