From Simulations to Surveys: Domain Adaptation for Galaxy Observations

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Brauer, Kaley, Dash, Aditya Prasad, Vyas, Meet J., Salim, Ahmed, Massala, Stiven Briand
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866914168487018496
author Brauer, Kaley
Dash, Aditya Prasad
Vyas, Meet J.
Salim, Ahmed
Massala, Stiven Briand
author_facet Brauer, Kaley
Dash, Aditya Prasad
Vyas, Meet J.
Salim, Ahmed
Massala, Stiven Briand
contents Large photometric surveys will image billions of galaxies, but we currently lack quick, reliable automated ways to infer their physical properties like morphology, stellar mass, and star formation rates. Simulations provide galaxy images with ground-truth physical labels, but domain shifts in PSF, noise, backgrounds, selection, and label priors degrade transfer to real surveys. We present a preliminary domain adaptation pipeline that trains on simulated TNG50 galaxies and evaluates on real SDSS galaxies with morphology labels (elliptical/spiral/irregular). We train three backbones (CNN, $E(2)$-steerable CNN, ResNet-18) with focal loss and effective-number class weighting, and a feature-level domain loss $L_D$ built from GeomLoss (entropic Sinkhorn OT, energy distance, Gaussian MMD, and related metrics). We show that a combination of these losses with an OT-based "top_$k$ soft matching" loss that focuses $L_D$ on the worst-matched source-target pairs can further enhance domain alignment. With Euclidean distance, scheduled alignment weights, and top-$k$ matching, target accuracy (macro F1) rises from $\sim$46% ($\sim$30%) at no adaptation to $\sim$87% ($\sim$62.6%), with a domain AUC near 0.5, indicating strong latent-space mixing.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_18590
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Simulations to Surveys: Domain Adaptation for Galaxy Observations
Brauer, Kaley
Dash, Aditya Prasad
Vyas, Meet J.
Salim, Ahmed
Massala, Stiven Briand
Astrophysics of Galaxies
Machine Learning
Large photometric surveys will image billions of galaxies, but we currently lack quick, reliable automated ways to infer their physical properties like morphology, stellar mass, and star formation rates. Simulations provide galaxy images with ground-truth physical labels, but domain shifts in PSF, noise, backgrounds, selection, and label priors degrade transfer to real surveys. We present a preliminary domain adaptation pipeline that trains on simulated TNG50 galaxies and evaluates on real SDSS galaxies with morphology labels (elliptical/spiral/irregular). We train three backbones (CNN, $E(2)$-steerable CNN, ResNet-18) with focal loss and effective-number class weighting, and a feature-level domain loss $L_D$ built from GeomLoss (entropic Sinkhorn OT, energy distance, Gaussian MMD, and related metrics). We show that a combination of these losses with an OT-based "top_$k$ soft matching" loss that focuses $L_D$ on the worst-matched source-target pairs can further enhance domain alignment. With Euclidean distance, scheduled alignment weights, and top-$k$ matching, target accuracy (macro F1) rises from $\sim$46% ($\sim$30%) at no adaptation to $\sim$87% ($\sim$62.6%), with a domain AUC near 0.5, indicating strong latent-space mixing.
title From Simulations to Surveys: Domain Adaptation for Galaxy Observations
topic Astrophysics of Galaxies
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18590