Variational Autoencoder with Normalizing flow for X-ray spectral fitting

Fuente: arXiv
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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Redmen, Fiona, Tregidga, Ethan, Steiner, James F., Garraffo, Cecilia
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Redmen, Fiona
Tregidga, Ethan
Steiner, James F.
Garraffo, Cecilia
author_facet Redmen, Fiona
Tregidga, Ethan
Steiner, James F.
Garraffo, Cecilia
contents Black hole X-ray binaries (BHBs) can be studied with spectral fitting to provide physical constraints on accretion in extreme gravitational environments. Traditional methods of spectral fitting such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) face limitations due to computational times. We introduce a probabilistic model, utilizing a variational autoencoder with a normalizing flow, trained to adopt a physical latent space. This neural network produces predictions for spectral-model parameters as well as their full probability distributions. Our implementations result in a significant improvement in spectral reconstructions over a previous deterministic model while performing three orders of magnitude faster than traditional methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_07440
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Variational Autoencoder with Normalizing flow for X-ray spectral fitting
Redmen, Fiona
Tregidga, Ethan
Steiner, James F.
Garraffo, Cecilia
Machine Learning
J.2; I.2.6
Black hole X-ray binaries (BHBs) can be studied with spectral fitting to provide physical constraints on accretion in extreme gravitational environments. Traditional methods of spectral fitting such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) face limitations due to computational times. We introduce a probabilistic model, utilizing a variational autoencoder with a normalizing flow, trained to adopt a physical latent space. This neural network produces predictions for spectral-model parameters as well as their full probability distributions. Our implementations result in a significant improvement in spectral reconstructions over a previous deterministic model while performing three orders of magnitude faster than traditional methods.
title Variational Autoencoder with Normalizing flow for X-ray spectral fitting
topic Machine Learning
J.2; I.2.6
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07440