IMOct 25, 2025
RGC: a radio AGN classifier based on deep learning. I. A semi-supervised model for the VLA images of bent radio AGNsM. S. Hossain, M. S. H. Shahal, A. Khan et al.
Wide-angle tail (WAT) and narrow-angle tail (NAT) radio active galactic nuclei (RAGNs) are key tracers of dense environments in galaxy groups and clusters, yet no machine-learning classifier of bent RAGNs has been trained using both unlabeled data and purely visually inspected labels. We release the RGC Python package, which includes two newly preprocessed labeled datasets of 639 WATs and NATs derived from a publicly available catalog of visually inspected sources, along with a semi-supervised RGC model that leverages 20,000 unlabeled RAGNs. The two labeled datasets in RGC were preprocessed using PyBDSF which retains spurious sources, and Photutils which removes them. The RGC model integrates the self-supervised framework BYOL (Bootstrap YOur Latent) with the supervised E2CNN (E2-equivariant Convolutional Neural Network) to form a semi-supervised binary classifier. The RGC model, when trained and evaluated on a dataset devoid of spurious sources, reaches peak performance, attaining an accuracy of 88.88% along with F1-scores of 0.90 for WATs and 0.85 for NATs. The model's attention patterns amid class imbalance suggest that this work can serve as a stepping stone toward developing physics-informed foundation models capable of identifying a broad range of AGN physical properties.
IMMay 31, 2023
Morphological Classification of Radio Galaxies using Semi-Supervised Group Equivariant CNNsMir Sazzat Hossain, Sugandha Roy, K. M. B. Asad et al.
Out of the estimated few trillion galaxies, only around a million have been detected through radio frequencies, and only a tiny fraction, approximately a thousand, have been manually classified. We have addressed this disparity between labeled and unlabeled images of radio galaxies by employing a semi-supervised learning approach to classify them into the known Fanaroff-Riley Type I (FRI) and Type II (FRII) categories. A Group Equivariant Convolutional Neural Network (G-CNN) was used as an encoder of the state-of-the-art self-supervised methods SimCLR (A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations) and BYOL (Bootstrap Your Own Latent). The G-CNN preserves the equivariance for the Euclidean Group E(2), enabling it to effectively learn the representation of globally oriented feature maps. After representation learning, we trained a fully-connected classifier and fine-tuned the trained encoder with labeled data. Our findings demonstrate that our semi-supervised approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods across several metrics, including cluster quality, convergence rate, accuracy, precision, recall, and the F1-score. Moreover, statistical significance testing via a t-test revealed that our method surpasses the performance of a fully supervised G-CNN. This study emphasizes the importance of semi-supervised learning in radio galaxy classification, where labeled data are still scarce, but the prospects for discovery are immense.