GIAT: A Geologically-Informed Attention Transformer for Lithology Identification

Accurate geological characterization of subsurface reservoirs from well log data is essential to support projects such as carbon capture and storage (CCS), geothermal development, and extraction of natural resources. Existing automated techniques for geological characterization primarily use sliding-window classification, which limits their ability to understand broader geological contexts, often leading to misaligned formation layers. To overcome these limitations, we introduce LithoFormer, a robust framework for stratigraphic inference using a Seq2Seq transformer model that ingests entire multivariate well logs in a single pass. The framework utilizes a channel-independent PatchTST backbone enhanced with rotary positional embeddings (RoPE) to capture long-range geological dependencies across entire multivariate well logs. A decoupled multi-task head is employed to jointly predict geological zonation and precise boundary probabilities, while a geology-informed loss function enforces physical constraints such as the Law of Superposition. Validated and deployed on three real-world datasets, LithoFormer demonstrates a 90% reduction in median boundary error and eliminates stratigraphic order violations compared to traditional sliding-window baselines. It also achieves a 80% reduction in manual expert labor and eliminates stratigraphic inconsistencies, providing a scalable and reliable solution for large-scale subsurface modeling.

Lithology classification in well logs is a fundamental geoscience data mining task that aims to infer rock types from multi dimensional geophysical sequences. Despite recent progress, existing approaches typically formulate the problem as a static, single-step discriminative mapping. This static paradigm limits evidence-based diagnostic reasoning against geological standards, often yielding predictions that are detached from geological reality due to a lack of domain priors. In this work, we propose GeoMind, a tool-augmented agentic framework that models lithology classification as a sequential reasoning process. GeoMind organizes its toolkit into perception, reasoning, and analysis modules, which respectively translate raw logs into semantic trends, infer lithology hypotheses from multi-source evidence, and verify predictions against stratigraphic constraints. A global planner adaptively coordinates these modules based on input characteristics, enabling geologically plausible and evidence-grounded decisions. To guarantee the logical consistency of GeoMind, we introduce a fine-grained process supervision strategy. Unlike standard methods that focus solely on final outcomes, our approach optimizes intermediate reasoning steps, ensuring the validity of decision trajectories and alignment to geological constraints. Experiments on four benchmark well-log datasets demonstrate that GeoMind consistently outperforms strong baselines in classification performance while providing transparent and traceable decision-making processes.

Lithology classification aims to infer subsurface rock types from well-logging signals, supporting downstream applications like reservoir characterization. Despite substantial progress, most existing methods still treat lithology classification as a single-pass classification task. In contrast, practical experts incorporate geological principles, external knowledge, and tool-use capabilities to perform accurate classification. In this work, we propose GeoDecider, a coarse-to-fine agentic workflow that enables accurate and explainable lithology classification through training-free use of large language models (LLMs). GeoDecider reformulates lithology classification as an expert-like structured process and organizes it into a multi-stage workflow involving coarse-to-fine reasoning. Specifically, GeoDecider includes the following stages: (1) base classifier-guided coarse classification, which uses a pre-trained classifier to provide a rough reference for downstream tasks, thus reducing the overall cost of downstream reasoning, (2) tool-augmented reasoning, which utilizes several tools such as contextual analysis and neighbor retrieval to achieve finer and more precise classifications, (3) geological refinement, which post-processes the final results to enforce geological consistency. Experiments on four benchmarks show that GeoDecider outperforms representative baselines. Further analysis demonstrates that the proposed framework produces geologically interpretable predictions while achieving a better trade-off between classification performance and inference efficiency.