Cecilia Garraffo

Mayeul Aubin, Carolina Cuesta-Lazaro, Ethan Tregidga et al.

Advancements in space telescopes have opened new avenues for gathering vast amounts of data on exoplanet atmosphere spectra. However, accurately extracting chemical and physical properties from these spectra poses significant challenges due to the non-linear nature of the underlying physics. This paper presents novel machine learning models developed by the AstroAI team for the Ariel Data Challenge 2023, where one of the models secured the top position among 293 competitors. Leveraging Normalizing Flows, our models predict the posterior probability distribution of atmospheric parameters under different atmospheric assumptions. Moreover, we introduce an alternative model that exhibits higher performance potential than the winning model, despite scoring lower in the challenge. These findings highlight the need to reevaluate the evaluation metric and prompt further exploration of more efficient and accurate approaches for exoplanet atmosphere spectra analysis. Finally, we present recommendations to enhance the challenge and models, providing valuable insights for future applications on real observational data. These advancements pave the way for more effective and timely analysis of exoplanet atmospheric properties, advancing our understanding of these distant worlds.

Manuel Pérez-Carrasco, Maya Nasr, Zhan Zhang et al.

Automated detection and masking of individual methane plumes from satellite imagery is important for operational emission attribution and quantification. We present a machine learning framework for plume detection from MethaneSAT retrieved column-averaged dry-air mole fractions of methane. We address two core challenges: the scarcity of labeled MethaneSAT data and the need for inference reliability across diverse atmospheric and surface conditions. We first demonstrate that Mask R-CNN with a ResNet-50 backbone outperforms U-Net semantic segmentation on both MethaneAIR (an airborne version of MethaneSAT) and MethaneSAT data, with pixel-level F1 score gains of 10.49 and 5.48 respectively. To address MethaneSAT data scarcity, we evaluate three cross-sensor transfer strategies leveraging MethaneAIR flights and synthetic plumes. Mask R-CNN with ResNet-50 fine-tuned from MethaneAIR pre-trained weights is the most effective strategy, achieving instance-level precision of 0.60 and a near-perfect recall of 0.98 at the baseline operating point. A physics-informed post-processing pipeline converts detections into two operationally distinct modes. The first is a high-sensitivity mode that applies morphological filtering and proximity-based merging for comprehensive emission screening, achieving precision of 0.71 and recall of 0.94. The second is a high-precision mode that additionally applies a distribution-based classifier for confident source attribution, achieving precision of 0.92 and recall of 0.70. Manual review of detections classified as false positives against our wavelet-based ground truth labels reveals that a meaningful fraction of cases correspond to real methane enhancements excluded by conservative labeling criteria, indicating that precision values reported are lower bounds on true detection performance... Our data and code are available at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FR959H

V. Samuel Pérez-Díaz, Vinay L. Kashyap, Joshua D. Ingram et al.

We present a framework to cross-match sources from the Chandra Source Catalog (CSC v2.1) with optical sources from Gaia Data Release 3. Unlike purely spatial approaches, we use source properties such as magnitudes, colors, and distances to identify true counterparts, detect chance coincidences, and resolve ambiguities when multiple plausible candidates exist. We define a training set of high-confidence matches using NWAY, a Bayesian cross-matching framework that accounts for positional errors and source densities. We train a gradient-boosted classifier (LightGBM) on a variety of features from both catalogs. Of the ~$254$k unique X-ray sources, we find counterparts for ~$113$k sources, of which plausible multiple counterparts are found for ~$7$k. We find no counterparts for ~$20$k sources for which separation-based cross-matching does find a match, and attribute half of these to chance coincidences. We validate the pipeline on the Chandra Orion Ultradeep Project (COUP), where the machine-learning matches reproduce 95% of NWAY cross-matches without using any positional information. We release a catalog of the ~$113$k Chandra-Gaia counterparts, together with ~$7$k alternative matches and ~$20$k ambiguous NWAY associations, supporting future population studies of sources detectable by both Chandra and Gaia. We discuss limitations and provide a generalization of the framework that is applicable in other cross-matching scenarios.

Fiona Redmen, Ethan Tregidga, James F. Steiner et al.

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.

Nicolò Oreste Pinciroli Vago, Rocco Di Tella, Carolina Cuesta-Lázaro et al.

Astronomers have acquired vast repositories of multimodal data, including images, spectra, and time series, complemented by decades of literature that analyzes astrophysical sources. Still, these data sources are rarely systematically integrated. This work introduces a contrastive learning framework designed to align X-ray spectra with domain knowledge extracted from scientific literature, facilitating the development of shared multimodal representations. Establishing this connection is inherently complex, as scientific texts encompass a broader and more diverse physical context than spectra. We propose a contrastive pipeline that achieves a 20% Recall@1% when retrieving texts from spectra, proving that a meaningful alignment between these modalities is not only possible but capable of accelerating the interpretation of rare or poorly understood sources. Furthermore, the resulting shared latent space effectively encodes physically significant information. By fusing spectral and textual data, we improve the estimation of 20 physical variables by 16-18% over unimodal spectral baselines. Our results indicate that a Mixture of Experts (MoE) strategy, which leverages both unimodal and shared representations, yields superior performance. Finally, outlier analysis within the multimodal latent space identifies high-priority targets for follow-up investigation, including a candidate pulsating ULX (PULX) and a gravitational lens system. Importantly, this framework can be extended to other scientific domains where aligning observational data with existing literature is possible.