Bruno Regaldo-Saint Blancard

Pablo Lemos, Liam Parker, ChangHoon Hahn et al.

We present the first simulation-based inference (SBI) of cosmological parameters from field-level analysis of galaxy clustering. Standard galaxy clustering analyses rely on analyzing summary statistics, such as the power spectrum, $P_\ell$, with analytic models based on perturbation theory. Consequently, they do not fully exploit the non-linear and non-Gaussian features of the galaxy distribution. To address these limitations, we use the {\sc SimBIG} forward modelling framework to perform SBI using normalizing flows. We apply SimBIG to a subset of the BOSS CMASS galaxy sample using a convolutional neural network with stochastic weight averaging to perform massive data compression of the galaxy field. We infer constraints on $Ω_m = 0.267^{+0.033}_{-0.029}$ and $σ_8=0.762^{+0.036}_{-0.035}$. While our constraints on $Ω_m$ are in-line with standard $P_\ell$ analyses, those on $σ_8$ are $2.65\times$ tighter. Our analysis also provides constraints on the Hubble constant $H_0=64.5 \pm 3.8 \ {\rm km / s / Mpc}$ from galaxy clustering alone. This higher constraining power comes from additional non-Gaussian cosmological information, inaccessible with $P_\ell$. We demonstrate the robustness of our analysis by showcasing our ability to infer unbiased cosmological constraints from a series of test simulations that are constructed using different forward models than the one used in our training dataset. This work not only presents competitive cosmological constraints but also introduces novel methods for leveraging additional cosmological information in upcoming galaxy surveys like DESI, PFS, and Euclid.

Michael McCabe, Payel Mukhopadhyay, Tanya Marwah et al. · cambridge

Foundation models have transformed machine learning for language and vision, but achieving comparable impact in physical simulation remains a challenge. Data heterogeneity and unstable long-term dynamics inhibit learning from sufficiently diverse dynamics, while varying resolutions and dimensionalities challenge efficient training on modern hardware. Through empirical and theoretical analysis, we incorporate new approaches to mitigate these obstacles, including a harmonic-analysis-based stabilization method, load-balanced distributed 2D and 3D training strategies, and compute-adaptive tokenization. Using these tools, we develop Walrus, a transformer-based foundation model developed primarily for fluid-like continuum dynamics. Walrus is pretrained on nineteen diverse scenarios spanning astrophysics, geoscience, rheology, plasma physics, acoustics, and classical fluids. Experiments show that Walrus outperforms prior foundation models on both short and long term prediction horizons on downstream tasks and across the breadth of pretraining data, while ablation studies confirm the value of our contributions to forecast stability, training throughput, and transfer performance over conventional approaches. Code and weights are released for community use.

Liam Parker, Francois Lanusse, Siavash Golkar et al.

We present AstroCLIP, a single, versatile model that can embed both galaxy images and spectra into a shared, physically meaningful latent space. These embeddings can then be used - without any model fine-tuning - for a variety of downstream tasks including (1) accurate in-modality and cross-modality semantic similarity search, (2) photometric redshift estimation, (3) galaxy property estimation from both images and spectra, and (4) morphology classification. Our approach to implementing AstroCLIP consists of two parts. First, we embed galaxy images and spectra separately by pretraining separate transformer-based image and spectrum encoders in self-supervised settings. We then align the encoders using a contrastive loss. We apply our method to spectra from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and images from its corresponding Legacy Imaging Survey. Overall, we find remarkable performance on all downstream tasks, even relative to supervised baselines. For example, for a task like photometric redshift prediction, we find similar performance to a specifically-trained ResNet18, and for additional tasks like physical property estimation (stellar mass, age, metallicity, and sSFR), we beat this supervised baseline by 19\% in terms of $R^2$. We also compare our results to a state-of-the-art self-supervised single-modal model for galaxy images, and find that our approach outperforms this benchmark by roughly a factor of two on photometric redshift estimation and physical property prediction in terms of $R^2$, while remaining roughly in-line in terms of morphology classification. Ultimately, our approach represents the first cross-modal self-supervised model for galaxies, and the first self-supervised transformer-based architectures for galaxy images and spectra.