Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Microseismic Phase Picking Using a Neural Operator

Seismic phase picking is fundamental for microseismic monitoring and subsurface imaging. Manual processing is impractical for real-time applications and large sensor arrays, motivating the use of deep learning-based pickers trained on extensive earthquake catalogs. On a broader scale, these models are generally tuned to perform optimally in high signal-to-noise and long-duration networks and often fail to perform satisfactorily when applied to campaign-based microseismic datasets, which are characterized by low signal-to-noise ratios, sparse geometries, and limited labeled data. In this study, we present a microseismic adaptation of a network-wide earthquake phase picker, Phase Neural Operator (PhaseNO), using transfer learning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Starting from a model pre-trained on more than 57,000 three-component earthquake and noise records, we fine-tune it using only 200 labeled and noisy microseismic recordings from hydraulic fracturing settings. We present a parameter-efficient adaptation of PhaseNO that fine-tunes a small fraction of its parameters (only 3.6%) while retaining its global spatiotemporal representations learned from a large dataset of earthquake recordings. We then evaluate our adapted model on three independent microseismic datasets and compare its performance against the original pre-trained PhaseNO, a STA/LTA-based workflow, and two state-of-the-art deep learning models, PhaseNet and EQTransformer. We demonstrate that our adapted model significantly outperforms the original PhaseNO in F1 and accuracy metrics, achieving up to 30% absolute improvements in all test sets and consistently performing better than STA/LTA and state-of-the-art models. With our adaptation being based on a small calibration set, our proposed workflow is a practical and efficient tool to deploy network-wide models in data-limited microseismic applications.