English

WLFM: A Well-Logs Foundation Model for Multi-Task and Cross-Well Geological Interpretation

Machine Learning 2025-09-24 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Well-log interpretation is fundamental for subsurface characterization but remains challenged by heterogeneous tool responses, noisy signals, and limited labels. We propose WLFM, a foundation model pretrained on multi-curve logs from 1200 wells, comprising three stages: tokenization of log patches into geological tokens, self-supervised pretraining with masked-token modeling and stratigraphy-aware contrastive learning, and multi-task adaptation with few-shot fine-tuning. WLFM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving 0.0041 MSE in porosity estimation and 74.13\% accuracy in lithology classification, while WLFM-Finetune further improves to 0.0038 MSE and 78.10\% accuracy. Beyond predictive accuracy, WLFM exhibits emergent layer-awareness, learns a reusable geological vocabulary, and reconstructs masked curves with reasonable fidelity, though systematic offsets are observed in shallow and ultra-deep intervals. Although boundary detection is not explicitly evaluated here, clustering analyses suggest strong potential for future extension. These results establish WLFM as a scalable, interpretable, and transferable backbone for geological AI, with implications for multi-modal integration of logs, seismic, and textual data.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.18152,
  title  = {WLFM: A Well-Logs Foundation Model for Multi-Task and Cross-Well Geological Interpretation},
  author = {Zhenyu Qi and Qing Yu and Jichen Wang and Yun-Bo Zhao and Zerui Li and Wenjun Lv},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.18152},
  year   = {2025}
}