Deep Learning in Earthquake Engineering: A Comprehensive Review

This paper surveys the growing interest in utilizing deep learning (DL) as a powerful tool to address challenging problems in earthquake engineering. Despite decades of advancement in domain knowledge, issues such as uncertainty in earthquake occurrence, unpredictable seismic loads, nonlinear structural responses, and community engagement remain difficult to tackle using domain-specific methods. DL offers promising solutions by leveraging its data-driven capacity for nonlinear mapping, sequential data modeling, automatic feature extraction, dimensionality reduction, optimal decision-making, and so on. However, the literature lacks a comprehensive review that systematically covers a consistent scope intersecting DL and earthquake engineering. To bridge this gap, this paper first discusses methodological advances to elucidate various applicable DL techniques, such as multilayer perceptron, convolutional neural network (CNN), recurrent neural network (RNN), generative adversarial network, autoencoder, transfer learning, reinforcement learning (RL), and graph neural network. A thorough research landscape is then disclosed by exploring various DL applications across different research topics, including vision-based seismic damage assessment and structural characterization, seismic demand and damage state prediction, seismic response history prediction, regional seismic risk assessment and community resilience, ground motion (GM) for engineering use, seismic response control, and the inverse problem of system/damage identification. Suitable DL techniques for each research topic are identified, emphasizing the preeminence of CNN for vision-based tasks, RNN for sequential data, RL for community resilience, and unsupervised learning for GM analysis. The paper also discusses opportunities and challenges for leveraging DL in earthquake engineering research and practice, highlighting the need for open-access multimodal big data and efforts to enhance model interpretability and incorporate physics information into DL. Finally, the paper advocates for DL applications to further advance the research frontier of uncertainty quantification in performance-based earthquake engineering.