C3NN-SBI: Learning Hierarchies of $N$-Point Statistics from Cosmological Fields with Physics-Informed Neural Networks

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Main Authors: Lehman, Kai, Gong, Zhengyangguang, Gebauer, David, Seitz, Stella, Weller, Jochen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Lehman, Kai
Gong, Zhengyangguang
Gebauer, David
Seitz, Stella
Weller, Jochen
author_facet Lehman, Kai
Gong, Zhengyangguang
Gebauer, David
Seitz, Stella
Weller, Jochen
contents Cosmological analyses are moving past the well understood 2-point statistics to extract more information from cosmological fields. A natural step in extending inference pipelines to other summary statistics is to include higher order N-point correlation functions (NPCFs), which are computationally expensive and difficult to model. At the same time it is unclear how many NPCFs one would have to include to reasonably exhaust the cosmological information in the observable fields. An efficient alternative is given by learned and optimized summary statistics, largely driven by overparametrization through neural networks. This, however, largely abandons our physical intuition on the NPCF formalism and information extraction becomes opaque to the practitioner. We design a simulation-based inference pipeline, that not only benefits from the efficiency of machine learned summaries through optimization, but also holds on to the NPCF program. We employ the heavily constrained Cosmological Correlator Convolutional Neural Network (C3NN) which extracts summary statistics that can be directly linked to a given order NPCF. We present an application of our framework to simulated lensing convergence maps and study the information content of our learned summary at various orders in NPCFs for this idealized example. We view our approach as an exciting new avenue for physics-informed simulation-based inference.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_16768
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle C3NN-SBI: Learning Hierarchies of $N$-Point Statistics from Cosmological Fields with Physics-Informed Neural Networks
Lehman, Kai
Gong, Zhengyangguang
Gebauer, David
Seitz, Stella
Weller, Jochen
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
Cosmological analyses are moving past the well understood 2-point statistics to extract more information from cosmological fields. A natural step in extending inference pipelines to other summary statistics is to include higher order N-point correlation functions (NPCFs), which are computationally expensive and difficult to model. At the same time it is unclear how many NPCFs one would have to include to reasonably exhaust the cosmological information in the observable fields. An efficient alternative is given by learned and optimized summary statistics, largely driven by overparametrization through neural networks. This, however, largely abandons our physical intuition on the NPCF formalism and information extraction becomes opaque to the practitioner. We design a simulation-based inference pipeline, that not only benefits from the efficiency of machine learned summaries through optimization, but also holds on to the NPCF program. We employ the heavily constrained Cosmological Correlator Convolutional Neural Network (C3NN) which extracts summary statistics that can be directly linked to a given order NPCF. We present an application of our framework to simulated lensing convergence maps and study the information content of our learned summary at various orders in NPCFs for this idealized example. We view our approach as an exciting new avenue for physics-informed simulation-based inference.
title C3NN-SBI: Learning Hierarchies of $N$-Point Statistics from Cosmological Fields with Physics-Informed Neural Networks
topic Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16768