GeoCFM: Positive-Only Conditional Flow Matching for Mineral Occurrence Sampling

arXiv:2609.34398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Critical mineral discovery is a positive-only problem: deposits are observed as sparse locations, while unlabeled regions are not reliable negatives, and similar geophysical signatures can arise from different subsurface states. We therefore model mineral targeting as learning a conditional spatial distribution over occurrence locations, pi(pmid d), given geo-images d, rather than predicting a deterministic per-pixel score map. We introduce GeoCFM, a conditional flow-matching model that generates mineral occurrence point sets conditioned on multi-channel geo-images; GeoCFM learns a point-wise transport field in R^2, using UNet features with point-conditioned velocity prediction to bridge dense rasters and sparse supervision without pseudo-negatives. On a synthetic magnetics--geochemistry benchmark with latent activation and on USGS Earth MRI data with a spatially disjoint tile split, GeoCFM improves geometric agreement with observed occurrences over score-map and non-conditional baselines, while representing epistemic uncertainty through conditional sampling.

Source: arXiv cs.LG | 2026-09-29