Blind Strong Gravitational Lensing Inversion: Joint Inference of Source and Lens Mass with Score-Based Models
This work addresses a key limitation in astrophysical imaging for researchers, enabling more accurate modeling of gravitational lensing systems.
The paper tackled the problem of jointly inferring the source galaxy and lens mass distribution in strong gravitational lensing, relaxing the assumption of a known lens mass, and achieved reconstructions with residuals consistent with observational noise and unbiased recovery of lens parameters.
Score-based models can serve as expressive, data-driven priors for scientific inverse problems. In strong gravitational lensing, they enable posterior inference of a background galaxy from its distorted, multiply-imaged observation. Previous work, however, assumes that the lens mass distribution (and thus the forward operator) is known. We relax this assumption by jointly inferring the source and a parametric lens-mass profile, using a sampler based on GibbsDDRM but operating in continuous time. The resulting reconstructions yield residuals consistent with the observational noise, and the marginal posteriors of the lens parameters recover true values without systematic bias. To our knowledge, this is the first successful demonstration of joint source-and-lens inference with a score-based prior.