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Main Authors: Hirashima, Keiya, Nozaki, Shingo, Harada, Naoto
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24159
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author Hirashima, Keiya
Nozaki, Shingo
Harada, Naoto
author_facet Hirashima, Keiya
Nozaki, Shingo
Harada, Naoto
contents Stellar mass is a fundamental quantity that determines the properties and evolution of stars. However, estimating stellar masses in star-forming regions is challenging because young stars are obscured by dense gas and the regions are highly inhomogeneous, making spherical dynamical estimates unreliable. Supervised machine learning could link such complex structures to stellar mass, but it requires large, high-quality labeled datasets from high-resolution magneto-hydrodynamical (MHD) simulations, which are computationally expensive. We address this by pretraining a vision transformer on one million synthetic fractal images using the self-supervised framework DINOv2, and then applying the frozen model to limited high-resolution MHD simulations. Our results demonstrate that synthetic pretraining improves frozen-feature regression stellar mass predictions, with the pretrained model performing slightly better than a supervised model trained on the same limited simulations. Principal component analysis of the extracted features further reveals semantically meaningful structures, suggesting that the model enables unsupervised segmentation of star-forming regions without the need for labeled data or fine-tuning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_24159
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Self-supervised Synthetic Pretraining for Inference of Stellar Mass Embedded in Dense Gas
Hirashima, Keiya
Nozaki, Shingo
Harada, Naoto
Astrophysics of Galaxies
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Stellar mass is a fundamental quantity that determines the properties and evolution of stars. However, estimating stellar masses in star-forming regions is challenging because young stars are obscured by dense gas and the regions are highly inhomogeneous, making spherical dynamical estimates unreliable. Supervised machine learning could link such complex structures to stellar mass, but it requires large, high-quality labeled datasets from high-resolution magneto-hydrodynamical (MHD) simulations, which are computationally expensive. We address this by pretraining a vision transformer on one million synthetic fractal images using the self-supervised framework DINOv2, and then applying the frozen model to limited high-resolution MHD simulations. Our results demonstrate that synthetic pretraining improves frozen-feature regression stellar mass predictions, with the pretrained model performing slightly better than a supervised model trained on the same limited simulations. Principal component analysis of the extracted features further reveals semantically meaningful structures, suggesting that the model enables unsupervised segmentation of star-forming regions without the need for labeled data or fine-tuning.
title Self-supervised Synthetic Pretraining for Inference of Stellar Mass Embedded in Dense Gas
topic Astrophysics of Galaxies
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24159