the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration

Ji Won Park, Simon Birrer, Madison Ueland et al. · cambridge

We present a Bayesian graph neural network (BGNN) that can estimate the weak lensing convergence ($κ$) from photometric measurements of galaxies along a given line of sight. The method is of particular interest in strong gravitational time delay cosmography (TDC), where characterizing the "external convergence" ($κ_{\rm ext}$) from the lens environment and line of sight is necessary for precise inference of the Hubble constant ($H_0$). Starting from a large-scale simulation with a $κ$ resolution of $\sim$1$'$, we introduce fluctuations on galaxy-galaxy lensing scales of $\sim$1$''$ and extract random sightlines to train our BGNN. We then evaluate the model on test sets with varying degrees of overlap with the training distribution. For each test set of 1,000 sightlines, the BGNN infers the individual $κ$ posteriors, which we combine in a hierarchical Bayesian model to yield constraints on the hyperparameters governing the population. For a test field well sampled by the training set, the BGNN recovers the population mean of $κ$ precisely and without bias, resulting in a contribution to the $H_0$ error budget well under 1\%. In the tails of the training set with sparse samples, the BGNN, which can ingest all available information about each sightline, extracts more $κ$ signal compared to a simplified version of the traditional method based on matching galaxy number counts, which is limited by sample variance. Our hierarchical inference pipeline using BGNNs promises to improve the $κ_{\rm ext}$ characterization for precision TDC. The implementation of our pipeline is available as a public Python package, Node to Joy.

Tatiana Acero-Cuellar, Federica Bianco, Gregory Dobler et al.

We present a study of the potential for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to enable separation of astrophysical transients from image artifacts, a task known as "real-bogus" classification without requiring a template subtracted (or difference) image which requires a computationally expensive process to generate, involving image matching on small spatial scales in large volumes of data. Using data from the Dark Energy Survey, we explore the use of CNNs to (1) automate the "real-bogus" classification, (2) reduce the computational costs of transient discovery. We compare the efficiency of two CNNs with similar architectures, one that uses "image triplets" (templates, search, and difference image) and one that takes as input the template and search only. We measure the decrease in efficiency associated with the loss of information in input finding that the testing accuracy is reduced from 96% to 91.1%. We further investigate how the latter model learns the required information from the template and search by exploring the saliency maps. Our work (1) confirms that CNNs are excellent models for "real-bogus" classification that rely exclusively on the imaging data and require no feature engineering task; (2) demonstrates that high-accuracy (> 90%) models can be built without the need to construct difference images, but some accuracy is lost. Since once trained, neural networks can generate predictions at minimal computational costs, we argue that future implementations of this methodology could dramatically reduce the computational costs in the detection of transients in synoptic surveys like Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time by bypassing the Difference Image Analysis entirely.

Ved G. Shah, Alex Gagliano, Konstantin Malanchev et al.

We present ORACLE, the first hierarchical deep-learning model for real-time, context-aware classification of transient and variable astrophysical phenomena. ORACLE is a recurrent neural network with Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs), and has been trained using a custom hierarchical cross-entropy loss function to provide high-confidence classifications along an observationally-driven taxonomy with as little as a single photometric observation. Contextual information for each object, including host galaxy photometric redshift, offset, ellipticity and brightness, is concatenated to the light curve embedding and used to make a final prediction. Training on $\sim$0.5M events from the Extended LSST Astronomical Time-Series Classification Challenge, we achieve a top-level (Transient vs Variable) macro-averaged precision of 0.96 using only 1 day of photometric observations after the first detection in addition to contextual information, for each event; this increases to $>$0.99 once 64 days of the light curve has been obtained, and 0.83 at 1024 days after first detection for 19-way classification (including supernova sub-types, active galactic nuclei, variable stars, microlensing events, and kilonovae). We also compare ORACLE with other state-of-the-art classifiers and report comparable performance for the 19-way classification task, in addition to delivering accurate top-level classifications much earlier. The code and model weights used in this work are publicly available at our associated GitHub repository (https://github.com/uiucsn/ELAsTiCC-Classification).

Aakash Patel, Tianqing Zhang, Camille Avestruz et al.

Neural posterior estimation (NPE), a type of amortized variational inference, is a computationally efficient means of constructing probabilistic catalogs of light sources from astronomical images. To date, NPE has not been used to perform inference in models with spatially varying covariates. However, ground-based astronomical images have spatially varying sky backgrounds and point spread functions (PSFs), and accounting for this variation is essential for constructing accurate catalogs of imaged light sources. In this work, we introduce a method of performing NPE with spatially varying backgrounds and PSFs. In this method, we generate synthetic catalogs and semi-synthetic images for these catalogs using randomly sampled PSF and background estimates from existing surveys. Using this data, we train a neural network, which takes an astronomical image and representations of its background and PSF as input, to output a probabilistic catalog. Our experiments with Sloan Digital Sky Survey data demonstrate the effectiveness of NPE in the presence of spatially varying backgrounds and PSFs for light source detection, star/galaxy separation, and flux measurement.

Sandeep Madireddy, Nesar Ramachandra, Nan Li et al.

Upcoming large astronomical surveys are expected to capture an unprecedented number of strong gravitational lensing systems. Deep learning is emerging as a promising practical tool for the detection and quantification of these galaxy-scale image distortions. The absence of large quantities of representative data from current astronomical surveys motivates the development of a robust forward-modeling approach using synthetic lensing images. Using a mock sample of strong lenses created upon a state-of-the-art extragalactic catalogs, we train a modular deep learning pipeline for uncertainty-quantified detection and modeling with intermediate image processing components for denoising and deblending the lensing systems. We demonstrate a high degree of interpretability and controlled systematics due to domain-specific task modules trained with different stages of synthetic image generation. For lens detection and modeling, we obtain semantically meaningful latent spaces that separate classes of strong lens images and yield uncertainty estimates that explain the origin of misclassified images and provide probabilistic predictions for the lens parameters. Validation of the inference pipeline has been carried out using images from the Subaru telescope's Hyper Suprime-Cam camera, and LSST DESC simulated DC2 sky survey catalogues.