Attention-Guided Flow-Matching for Sparse 3D Geological Generation

arXiv cs.CV / 4/14/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper addresses the ill-posed task of generating high-resolution 3D geological models from extremely sparse borehole (1D) and surface (2D) data, where prior methods often produce unrealistic artifacts.
  • It introduces 3D-GeoFlow, an Attention-Guided Continuous Flow Matching framework that reformulates sparse discrete geological generation as continuous vector-field regression to obtain stable, deterministic optimal-transport paths.
  • The approach uses 3D Attention Gates to dynamically propagate localized borehole information across a volumetric latent space, aiming to preserve macroscopic structural coherence and reduce discontinuity artifacts.
  • The authors validate the method using a curated dataset of 2,200 procedurally generated 3D geological cases and report strong out-of-distribution performance over heuristic interpolation and standard diffusion baselines.
  • Overall, the work claims a “paradigm shift” for sparse multimodal geological generation by mitigating representation collapse common in diffusion models under sparse categorical conditioning.

Abstract

Constructing high-resolution 3D geological models from sparse 1D borehole and 2D surface data is a highly ill-posed inverse problem. Traditional heuristic and implicit modeling methods fundamentally fail to capture non-linear topological discontinuities under extreme sparsity, often yielding unrealistic artifacts. Furthermore, while deep generative architectures like Diffusion Models have revolutionized continuous domains, they suffer from severe representation collapse when conditioned on sparse categorical grids. To bridge this gap, we propose 3D-GeoFlow, the first Attention-Guided Continuous Flow Matching framework tailored for sparse multimodal geological modeling. By reformulating discrete categorical generation as a simulation-free, continuous vector field regression optimized via Mean Squared Error, our model establishes stable, deterministic optimal transport paths. Crucially, we integrate 3D Attention Gates to dynamically propagate localized borehole features across the volumetric latent space, ensuring macroscopic structural coherence. To validate our framework, we curated a large-scale multimodal dataset comprising 2,200 procedurally generated 3D geological cases. Extensive out-of-distribution (OOD) evaluations demonstrate that 3D-GeoFlow achieves a paradigm shift, significantly outperforming heuristic interpolations and standard diffusion baselines.