arXiv Machine Learning

EncoTESS: Age-Sensitive Encodings from Raw TESS Light Curves

EncoTESS is a compact Time Series Foundation Model trained on TESS 2‑minute light curves that encodes stellar variability into a fixed‑size latent space, handling noise, irregular sampling, and data gaps. It improves age estimation for young K and M stars (≤100 Myr) and older M stars (≤1 Gyr) by outperforming traditional rotation period and variability amplitude indicators. The model’s lightweight architecture (~1 % of typical TSFMs) allows deployment on standard laptops and can be extended to other TESS cadences and missions like Kepler and PLATO.

arXiv AI
Aug 20

DELOS: Contrastive Deep Learning for Low-SNR Blind Transit Searches in Kepler Photometry

DELOS is a deep‑learning framework that uses contrastive scoring to perform blind searches for shallow transits in Kepler photometry. It combines GPU‑accelerated phase folding, optimized phase binning, and a custom one‑dimensional convolutional encoder to produce a transit‑likeness score periodogram without relying on pre‑detected events. In tests on synthetic data and controlled injection‑recovery experiments, DELOS outperforms traditional methods (BLS and TLS) in precision‑recall and speed, and successfully recovers all known shallow intermediate‑to‑long‑period transit signals in a selected Kepler sample.

By Qingtian Liu, Jian Ge, XingChen Yan, Kevin Willis, Xinyu Yao, QuanQuan Hu, Jiapeng Zhu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 2

Leveraging Multimodality for Real-Time Classification of Transients and Variables found by the Zwicky Transient Facility

arXiv:2607. 00228v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern time-domain surveys such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) generate hundreds of thousands of alerts each night, making real-time decisions for follow-up observations a central challenge in time-domain astronomy.

By Ved G. Shah, Nabeel Rehemtulla, Adam A. Miller, Sushant Sharma Chaudhary, Michael W. Coughlin, Antoine Le Calloch, Matthew J. Graham, Joahan Castaneda Jaimes, Theophile Jegou du Laz, Ashish A. Mahabal, Frank J. Masci, Josiah Purdum, Reed Riddle, Jesper Sollerman, Anastasia Wei, Mansi M. Kasliwal
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Cross-simulator transfer with foundation model summaries: Towards robust SKA-era reionization inference

The paper demonstrates that a self‑supervised Vision Transformer (ViT) pretrained on a fast, low‑cost semi‑numerical simulator can produce data summaries that transfer across different simulators without retraining. In 21cm cosmology, the ViT—named SKATR—pretrained on 67,000 21cmFAST lightcones is applied unchanged to hydrodynamical Loreli II lightcones, enabling accurate inference of five astrophysical parameters with fewer radiative‑transfer simulations than a fully‑supervised baseline. SKATR remains accurate, informative, and calibrated even under realistic SKA antenna array noise, outperforming supervised models retrained on noisy data.

By Yannic Pietschke, Caroline Heneka, Ayodele Ore, Romain Meriot
arXiv AI
Oct 28

ASTROLABE: A 3D Particle-Level Surrogate for Cosmology Simulation with Physical Flow Matching

ASTROLABE is a flow‑matching generative emulator that operates directly on the 6N phase‑space coordinates of individual particles, avoiding voxel grids and allowing any observable to be measured from inference. It uses a field‑particle hybrid transformer so that compute and memory scale linearly with the number of particles, and incorporates physical flow matching by basing the prior on COLA‑derived coordinates with momentum and mass conservation enforced throughout the flow. In Lambda‑CDM tests, ASTROLABE reproduces realistic fields, accurate power spectra, halo mass functions, velocity profiles, and halo density profiles, and it generalizes to out‑of‑distribution dark‑acoustic oscillation initial conditions while also being fine‑tuned to emulate large‑scale simulations such as TNG50‑3‑dark at a fraction of the cost.

By Ibrahim Elsharkawy, David Curtin, Yonatan Kahn, Neal Weiner