Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Pre-Trained Vision Foundation Models for Active and Passive Seismic Data Denoising
Authors: Jiahua Zhao, Umair bin Waheed, Jing Sun, Yang Cui, Nikos Savva, Eric Verschuur
Organizations: Computation-based Science and Technology Research Center, The Cyprus Institute, Nicosia, Cyprus · Department of Geosciences, College of Petroleum Engineering and Geosciences, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia · Department of Intelligent Systems, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands · Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus · Department of Geoscience and Engineering, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands
The demand for high-resolution subsurface imaging and continuous Earth monitoring has driven rapid growth in active and passive seismic data from dense geophone deployments, distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) arrays, and large-scale 2D and 3D surveys. This expansion makes complex noise suppression increasingly challenging, especially when signal fidelity must be preserved. Conventional supervised deep learning methods are often task-specific, require large paired datasets, and can suffer from domain shift under new acquisition conditions. Foundation models offer a promising alternative, but pre-training seismic foundation models from scratch requires massive domain-specific data and substantial computation. We propose an efficient framework that repurposes general-purpose Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for geophysical tasks through Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning. The architecture uses a pre-trained VFM, a DINOv3 encoder, adapted with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to enable effective feature adaptation with few additional parameters. To improve robustness under unseen field conditions without ground truth, we introduce a kurtosis-guided unsupervised test-time adaptation module that updates only LoRA parameters during inference. This module self-calibrates the model to site-specific noise by identifying information-rich regions via kurtosis and performing self-training without labeled data. Experiments on public exploration seismic images and DAS vertical seismic profiling data from the Utah FORGE site show that the framework matches or outperforms domain-specific models. Tests on unseen cross-site data from a land survey in China and the Groß Schönebeck geothermal site in Germany further demonstrate strong generalization and effective signal-noise separation. These results highlight the potential of adapting pre-trained VFMs to data-intensive problems in exploration seismology.
The advent of large pretrained foundation models for computer vision has significantly improved the efficiency of visual data interpretation. The Segment Anything Model (SAM), in particular, offers powerful zero shot segmentation capabilities through prompt based interaction, thus making it a promising tool for seismic interpretation. However, most existing applications of SAM rely on fine tuning for specific geological targets, which requires extensive labeled data, incurs high computational cost, and often compromises the model's generalization capability. In this study, we introduce a principled framework for zero shot adaptation of foundation models to seismic data. The framework is built on two key components: (1) aligning seismic attributes and visualization choices (e.g., colormaps) with the geological target of interest, and (2) employing a hybrid prompting strategy that combines sparse user defined point prompts with dense mask prompts derived from SAM's internal feature activations. We systematically evaluate this framework across multiple geological targets, datasets, prompt configurations, and seismic attribute representations. Our results demonstrate that geologic target aware selection of seismic attributes and colormaps, combined with hybrid prompting, enhances the separability of geological features and improves boundary delineation and segmentation accuracy relative to point based prompting alone. Our findings show that, when these components are jointly applied, SAM can achieve competitive segmentation performance in a fully zero shot setting, thereby eliminating the need to retrain SAM for each geologic feature. This work establishes a practical and scalable pathway to leverage foundation models in seismic interpretation, reducing reliance on labeled data while preserving model generality.
Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have demonstrated impressive representational capabilities. However, adapting them to downstream tasks via full fine-tuning incurs prohibitive computational and storage overhead. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has emerged as a compelling alternative, aiming to achieve performance parity with full fine-tuning at minimal training costs. Nonetheless, applying PEFT to VFMs for dense prediction tasks remains challenging due to the structural and distributional gaps. To bridge these gaps, we propose \textbf{S}cale-\textbf{I}ntegrated \textbf{G}lobal \textbf{M}odulation \textbf{A}dapter (\textbf{SIGMA}), a novel lightweight PEFT method, which consists of two modules: scale-adaptive fusion and semantic modulation. Specifically, the scale-adaptive fusion module is utilized to bridge structural gaps by enhancing the extraction of multi-granularity visual information. Furthermore, SIGMA introduces semantic modulation on the fusion features to perform global feature alignment to further eliminate the distribution gap. This design facilitates unified spatial and distributional adaptation, requiring only 1.72% trainable parameters relative to the VFM backbone. Comprehensive experiments across various downstream dense tasks and multiple VFM backbones demonstrate that SIGMA achieves consistent and superior performance over state-of-the-art PEFT methods.
Fine-tuning foundation models for Earth Observation is computationally expensive, with high training time and memory demands for both training and deployment. Parameter-efficient methods reduce training cost but retain full inference complexity, while post-hoc compression optimizes inference only after costly full fine-tuning. We introduce SIMPLER, a pre-fine-tuning architecture selection method that reduces inference and deployment costs by identifying an effective model depth before adaptation. SIMPLER exploits stabilization of representations in deeper layers of pre-trained vision transformers: it computes layer-wise representation similarity on unlabeled task data and applies an automated scoring function to select redundant layers, with no gradients, magnitude heuristics, or hyperparameter tuning required. On Prithvi-EO-2, SIMPLER prunes up to 79% of parameters while retaining 94% of baseline performance, yielding a 2.1x training speedup and 2.6x inference speedup. The method generalizes to TerraMind (a multimodal EO foundation model) and ImageNet-pretrained ViT-MAE, demonstrating applicability across tasks, architectures, and spectral modalities. Code is available at https://gitlab.citius.gal/hpc4rs/simpler.
Víctor Barreiro, Johannes Jakubik, Francisco Argüello +1