STRADAViT is a self‑supervised continued‑pretraining framework that adapts Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones for radio‑astronomy image analysis. It curates mixed‑survey data, generates radio‑astronomy‑aware training views, and initializes encoders with ViT‑MAE, optionally adding register tokens. Evaluations on three morphology benchmarks (MiraBest, LoTSS DR2, and Radio Galaxy Zoo) show that a register‑based two‑stage checkpoint improves linear‑probe Macro‑F1 scores over the ViT‑MAE baseline and enhances fine‑tuning on MiraBest and RGZ DR1, though performance on LoTSS DR2 fine‑tuning declines; these differences are statistically significant.
By Andrea DeMarco, Ian Fenech Conti, Hayley Camilleri, Ardiana Bushi, Simone Riggi
The paper introduces AstroVLBench, a benchmark of 4,100 expert‑verified instances covering optical imaging, radio interferometry, multi‑wavelength photometry, time‑domain light curves, and optical spectroscopy. Six leading vision‑language models were evaluated, revealing that performance varies strongly with modality and is not predicted by general benchmark rankings. Mechanistic ablations identified three bottlenecks: prompt grounding depends on model and task, presenting one‑dimensional data as tables rather than plots improves light‑curve classification, and a significant fraction of correct predictions are supported by physically inconsistent reasoning.
By Wenke Ren, Hengxiao Guo, Wenwen Zuo, Xiaoman Zhang
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
The paper introduces a counterfactual benchmark to evaluate whether vision models understand physical constraints or merely learn rendering shortcuts. Using Mitsuba 3, it generates 5,500 synthetic images across 500 scene families, each with a clean image and ten violations (shadows, reflections, support, surface response, occlusion). Diagnostic baselines (LLaVA‑1.5‑7B, Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B, InternVL3.5‑8B) achieve 64.0–67.8 % macro‑F1 on a held‑out synthetic test set, but performance drops to 40.8 % for LLaVA‑1.5‑7B under an intervention shift, indicating reliance on rendering cues rather than true physical reasoning.
By M. Moein Esfahani, Sepehr Salem, Mohammed Alser, Vince Calhoun
arXiv:2606. 05103v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman), set for launch as early as September 2026, will conduct wide-field infrared imaging surveys with unprecedented spatial resolution and cadence, enabling the discovery of millions of astronomical transients.
By Karan Gandhi, Ashish A. Mahabal, Jacob E. Jencson, Russ R. Laher, Ben Rusholme, Lin Yan, Ryan M. Lau, Schuyler D. Van Dyk, Mansi M. Kasliwal
arXiv:2607. 16811v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Drift detectors that work tend not to explain themselves, and drift detectors that explain themselves tend to fail in high dimension.
By Behnam Asadi