Self-supervised learning for radio-astronomy source classification: a benchmark

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cecconello, Thomas, Riggi, Simone, Becciani, Ugo, Vitello, Fabio, Hopkins, Andrew M., Vizzari, Giuseppe, Spampinato, Concetto, Palazzo, Simone
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Cecconello, Thomas
Riggi, Simone
Becciani, Ugo
Vitello, Fabio
Hopkins, Andrew M.
Vizzari, Giuseppe
Spampinato, Concetto
Palazzo, Simone
author_facet Cecconello, Thomas
Riggi, Simone
Becciani, Ugo
Vitello, Fabio
Hopkins, Andrew M.
Vizzari, Giuseppe
Spampinato, Concetto
Palazzo, Simone
contents The upcoming Square Kilometer Array (SKA) telescope marks a significant step forward in radio astronomy, presenting new opportunities and challenges for data analysis. Traditional visual models pretrained on optical photography images may not perform optimally on radio interferometry images, which have distinct visual characteristics. Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) offers a promising approach to address this issue, leveraging the abundant unlabeled data in radio astronomy to train neural networks that learn useful representations from radio images. This study explores the application of SSL to radio astronomy, comparing the performance of SSL-trained models with that of traditional models pretrained on natural images, evaluating the importance of data curation for SSL, and assessing the potential benefits of self-supervision to different domain-specific radio astronomy datasets. Our results indicate that, SSL-trained models achieve significant improvements over the baseline in several downstream tasks, especially in the linear evaluation setting; when the entire backbone is fine-tuned, the benefits of SSL are less evident but still outperform pretraining. These findings suggest that SSL can play a valuable role in efficiently enhancing the analysis of radio astronomical data. The trained models and code is available at: \url{https://github.com/dr4thmos/solo-learn-radio}
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_14078
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Self-supervised learning for radio-astronomy source classification: a benchmark
Cecconello, Thomas
Riggi, Simone
Becciani, Ugo
Vitello, Fabio
Hopkins, Andrew M.
Vizzari, Giuseppe
Spampinato, Concetto
Palazzo, Simone
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The upcoming Square Kilometer Array (SKA) telescope marks a significant step forward in radio astronomy, presenting new opportunities and challenges for data analysis. Traditional visual models pretrained on optical photography images may not perform optimally on radio interferometry images, which have distinct visual characteristics. Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) offers a promising approach to address this issue, leveraging the abundant unlabeled data in radio astronomy to train neural networks that learn useful representations from radio images. This study explores the application of SSL to radio astronomy, comparing the performance of SSL-trained models with that of traditional models pretrained on natural images, evaluating the importance of data curation for SSL, and assessing the potential benefits of self-supervision to different domain-specific radio astronomy datasets. Our results indicate that, SSL-trained models achieve significant improvements over the baseline in several downstream tasks, especially in the linear evaluation setting; when the entire backbone is fine-tuned, the benefits of SSL are less evident but still outperform pretraining. These findings suggest that SSL can play a valuable role in efficiently enhancing the analysis of radio astronomical data. The trained models and code is available at: \url{https://github.com/dr4thmos/solo-learn-radio}
title Self-supervised learning for radio-astronomy source classification: a benchmark
topic Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.14078