Preliminary Report on Mantis Shrimp: a Multi-Survey Computer Vision Photometric Redshift Model
This work addresses the challenge of incorporating multi-instrument images for photometric redshift estimation in astronomy, but it appears incremental as it builds on prior computer vision models.
The authors tackled photometric redshift estimation by developing Mantis Shrimp, a multi-survey computer vision model that fuses ultraviolet, optical, and infrared imagery, using interpretability diagnostics to analyze how the model leverages different inputs.
The availability of large, public, multi-modal astronomical datasets presents an opportunity to execute novel research that straddles the line between science of AI and science of astronomy. Photometric redshift estimation is a well-established subfield of astronomy. Prior works show that computer vision models typically outperform catalog-based models, but these models face additional complexities when incorporating images from more than one instrument or sensor. In this report, we detail our progress creating Mantis Shrimp, a multi-survey computer vision model for photometric redshift estimation that fuses ultra-violet (GALEX), optical (PanSTARRS), and infrared (UnWISE) imagery. We use deep learning interpretability diagnostics to measure how the model leverages information from the different inputs. We reason about the behavior of the CNNs from the interpretability metrics, specifically framing the result in terms of physically-grounded knowledge of galaxy properties.