Multi-Modal Masked Autoencoders for Learning Image-Spectrum Associations for Galaxy Evolution and Cosmology

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Himes, Morgan, Krishnamurthy, Samiksha, Lizarraga, Andrew, Saikrishnan, Srinath, Seenivasan, Vikram, Soriano, Jonathan, Wu, Ying Nian, Do, Tuan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Himes, Morgan
Krishnamurthy, Samiksha
Lizarraga, Andrew
Saikrishnan, Srinath
Seenivasan, Vikram
Soriano, Jonathan
Wu, Ying Nian
Do, Tuan
author_facet Himes, Morgan
Krishnamurthy, Samiksha
Lizarraga, Andrew
Saikrishnan, Srinath
Seenivasan, Vikram
Soriano, Jonathan
Wu, Ying Nian
Do, Tuan
contents Upcoming surveys will produce billions of galaxy images but comparatively few spectra, motivating models that learn cross-modal representations. We build a dataset of 134,533 galaxy images (HSC-PDR2) and spectra (DESI-DR1) and adapt a Multi-Modal Masked Autoencoder (MMAE) to embed both images and spectra in a shared representation. The MMAE is a transformer-based architecture, which we train by masking 75% of the data and reconstructing missing image and spectral tokens. We use this model to test three applications: spectral and image reconstruction from heavily masked data and redshift regression from images alone. It recovers key physical features, such as galaxy shapes, atomic emission line peaks, and broad continuum slopes, though it struggles with fine image details and line strengths. For redshift regression, the MMAE performs comparably or better than prior multi-modal models in terms of prediction scatter even when missing spectra in testing. These results highlight both the potential and limitations of masked autoencoders in astrophysics and motivate extensions to additional modalities, such as text, for foundation models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_22527
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multi-Modal Masked Autoencoders for Learning Image-Spectrum Associations for Galaxy Evolution and Cosmology
Himes, Morgan
Krishnamurthy, Samiksha
Lizarraga, Andrew
Saikrishnan, Srinath
Seenivasan, Vikram
Soriano, Jonathan
Wu, Ying Nian
Do, Tuan
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Astrophysics of Galaxies
Machine Learning
Upcoming surveys will produce billions of galaxy images but comparatively few spectra, motivating models that learn cross-modal representations. We build a dataset of 134,533 galaxy images (HSC-PDR2) and spectra (DESI-DR1) and adapt a Multi-Modal Masked Autoencoder (MMAE) to embed both images and spectra in a shared representation. The MMAE is a transformer-based architecture, which we train by masking 75% of the data and reconstructing missing image and spectral tokens. We use this model to test three applications: spectral and image reconstruction from heavily masked data and redshift regression from images alone. It recovers key physical features, such as galaxy shapes, atomic emission line peaks, and broad continuum slopes, though it struggles with fine image details and line strengths. For redshift regression, the MMAE performs comparably or better than prior multi-modal models in terms of prediction scatter even when missing spectra in testing. These results highlight both the potential and limitations of masked autoencoders in astrophysics and motivate extensions to additional modalities, such as text, for foundation models.
title Multi-Modal Masked Autoencoders for Learning Image-Spectrum Associations for Galaxy Evolution and Cosmology
topic Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Astrophysics of Galaxies
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22527