physics.geo-phMay 11, 2026

Total Generalized Variation regularization closes the gap between neural-eld and classical methods in seismic travel-time tomography

Authors: Isao Kurosawa

Organizations: IVXA, Japan.

Abstract

Travel-time tomography forces a trade-off between mesh resolution and stability in which the regularizer choice dominates what can be recovered. We introduce MIMIR, a differentiable framework that represents the 2D velocity field as a Fourier-feature neural network, replacing the grid-based slowness vector with a continuous, infinitely differentiable function. Prior neural-field tomography has staircased smooth fields under total-variation (TV) priors or oscillated near interfaces under L2L^2 Laplacian smoothing. We adopt second-order total generalized variation (TGV2^2) and parametrize its auxiliary vector field as a second neural network jointly optimized with the velocity field, eliminating the inner Chambolle-Pock primal-dual loop that classically dominates TGV computation. On three synthetic benchmarks (Gaussian, horizontally layered, curved-fault inspired by OpenFWI) using cross-well acquisition, 5% travel-time noise, and five seeds, MIMIR-TGV2^2 ties a classical FMM-LSMR baseline with auto-tuned hyperparameters on the Gaussian (p=0.134p=0.134, paired tt-test) and significantly outperforms it on layered (p<0.0001p<0.0001, 44% RMSE reduction) and curved-fault (p=0.0002p=0.0002, 33% reduction). Replacing TGV2^2 with TV degrades performance on Gaussian (p=0.004p=0.004) and layered (p=0.003p=0.003); curriculum-annealed TV improves Gaussian RMSE by only 5.4%, confirming that TV's staircase bias is intrinsic to the regularizer rather than a scheduling artifact. The results empirically validate the Bredies-Kunisch-Pock prediction that piecewise-affine priors are better suited to subsurface velocity recovery than piecewise-constant TV priors. We argue that the central design choice in physics-informed neural-field inversion is not the network architecture but the regularizer. The full pipeline reproduces in under one hour on consumer hardware.

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