Lithology-Aware Conditional Variational Autoencoder for Synthetic Well Log Generation in Petroleum Reservoirs (Student Abstract)

Abstract

Machine learning applications in reservoir modeling are hindered by the limited availability of well log data, a common challenge in the oil and gas industry. We propose VAEc-tMC, a domain-informed Conditional Variational Autoencoder that generates synthetic well-log data conditioned on rock type. Addressing a critical gap by existing generative models that rely solely on statistical reconstruction, our model embeds geological domain knowledge into the latent space, and optimizes a modified objective with an adaptive Student-t reconstruction loss and a beta-weighted KL regularizer, improving stability under heavy-tailed data. When used for data augmentation, the synthetic samples preserve inter-log dependencies and substantially enhance downstream classification, accuracy 39→63%, F1-score 36→68%, AUC 0.46→0.80 on a held-out well. Beyond the geological context, the proposed approach illustrates a generalizable strategy where domain-aware generative models with adaptive loss functions provide a robust solution for data-efficient learning in scientific domains facing data scarcity, noise, and heavy-tailed distributions.