From Simulations to Surveys: Domain Adaptation for Galaxy Observations
This addresses the challenge of automated galaxy classification for astronomers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing domain adaptation techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of inferring galaxy physical properties from photometric surveys by adapting models trained on simulations to real observations, achieving a target accuracy increase from ~46% to ~87% in macro F1 score with domain adaptation.
Large photometric surveys will image billions of galaxies, but we currently lack quick, reliable automated ways to infer their physical properties like morphology, stellar mass, and star formation rates. Simulations provide galaxy images with ground-truth physical labels, but domain shifts in PSF, noise, backgrounds, selection, and label priors degrade transfer to real surveys. We present a preliminary domain adaptation pipeline that trains on simulated TNG50 galaxies and evaluates on real SDSS galaxies with morphology labels (elliptical/spiral/irregular). We train three backbones (CNN, $E(2)$-steerable CNN, ResNet-18) with focal loss and effective-number class weighting, and a feature-level domain loss $L_D$ built from GeomLoss (entropic Sinkhorn OT, energy distance, Gaussian MMD, and related metrics). We show that a combination of these losses with an OT-based "top_$k$ soft matching" loss that focuses $L_D$ on the worst-matched source-target pairs can further enhance domain alignment. With Euclidean distance, scheduled alignment weights, and top-$k$ matching, target accuracy (macro F1) rises from $\sim$46% ($\sim$30%) at no adaptation to $\sim$87% ($\sim$62.6%), with a domain AUC near 0.5, indicating strong latent-space mixing.