Network scaling and scale-driven loss balancing for intelligent characterization of poroelastic systems

A deep learning framework is developed for multiscale characterization of poroelastic media from full waveform data which is known as poroelastography. Special attention is paid to heterogeneous environments whose multiphase properties may drastically change across several scales. Described in space-frequency, the data takes the form of focal solid displacement and pore pressure fields in various neighborhoods furnished either by reconstruction from remote data or direct measurements depending on the application. The objective is to simultaneously recover the six hydromechanical properties germane to Biot equations and their spatial distribution in a robust and efficient manner. Two major challenges impede direct application of existing state-of-the-art techniques for this purpose: (i) the sought-for properties belong to vastly different and potentially uncertain scales, and (ii) the loss function is multi-objective and multi-scale (both in terms of its individual components and the total loss). To help bridge the gap, we propose the idea of network scaling where the neural property maps are constructed by unit shape functions composed into a scaling layer. In this model, the unknown network parameters (weights and biases) remain of O(1) during training. This forms the basis for explicit scaling of the loss components and their derivatives with respect to the network parameters. Thereby, we propose the physics-based dynamic scaling approach for adaptive loss balancing. The idea is first presented in a generic form for multi-physics and multi-scale PDE systems, and then applied through a set of numerical experiments to poroelastography. The results are presented along with reconstructions by way of gradient normalization (GradNorm) and Softmax adaptive weights (SoftAdapt) for loss balancing. A comparative analysis of the methods and corresponding results is provided. The case of multi-scale reconstructions from noisy data is also numerically investigated.