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Jan 21

Aurora-M: The First Open Source Multilingual Language Model Red-teamed according to the U.S. Executive Order

Pretrained language models underpin several AI applications, but their high computational cost for training limits accessibility. Initiatives such as BLOOM and StarCoder aim to democratize access to pretrained models for collaborative community development. However, such existing models face challenges: limited multilingual capabilities, continual pretraining causing catastrophic forgetting, whereas pretraining from scratch is computationally expensive, and compliance with AI safety and development laws. This paper presents Aurora-M, a 15B parameter multilingual open-source model trained on English, Finnish, Hindi, Japanese, Vietnamese, and code. Continually pretrained from StarCoderPlus on 435 billion additional tokens, Aurora-M surpasses 2 trillion tokens in total training token count. It is the first open-source multilingual model fine-tuned on human-reviewed safety instructions, thus aligning its development not only with conventional red-teaming considerations, but also with the specific concerns articulated in the Biden-Harris Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. Aurora-M is rigorously evaluated across various tasks and languages, demonstrating robustness against catastrophic forgetting and outperforming alternatives in multilingual settings, particularly in safety evaluations. To promote responsible open-source LLM development, Aurora-M and its variants are released at https://huggingface.co/collections/aurora-m/aurora-m-models-65fdfdff62471e09812f5407 .

  • 45 authors
·
Mar 30, 2024 1

Connecting the Dots: A Machine Learning Ready Dataset for Ionospheric Forecasting Models

Operational forecasting of the ionosphere remains a critical space weather challenge due to sparse observations, complex coupling across geospatial layers, and a growing need for timely, accurate predictions that support Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), communications, aviation safety, as well as satellite operations. As part of the 2025 NASA Heliolab, we present a curated, open-access dataset that integrates diverse ionospheric and heliospheric measurements into a coherent, machine learning-ready structure, designed specifically to support next-generation forecasting models and address gaps in current operational frameworks. Our workflow integrates a large selection of data sources comprising Solar Dynamic Observatory data, solar irradiance indices (F10.7), solar wind parameters (velocity and interplanetary magnetic field), geomagnetic activity indices (Kp, AE, SYM-H), and NASA JPL's Global Ionospheric Maps of Total Electron Content (GIM-TEC). We also implement geospatially sparse data such as the TEC derived from the World-Wide GNSS Receiver Network and crowdsourced Android smartphone measurements. This novel heterogeneous dataset is temporally and spatially aligned into a single, modular data structure that supports both physical and data-driven modeling. Leveraging this dataset, we train and benchmark several spatiotemporal machine learning architectures for forecasting vertical TEC under both quiet and geomagnetically active conditions. This work presents an extensive dataset and modeling pipeline that enables exploration of not only ionospheric dynamics but also broader Sun-Earth interactions, supporting both scientific inquiry and operational forecasting efforts.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 18, 2025

Finetuning a Weather Foundation Model with Lightweight Decoders for Unseen Physical Processes

Recent advances in AI weather forecasting have led to the emergence of so-called "foundation models", typically defined by expensive pretraining and minimal fine-tuning for downstream tasks. However, in the natural sciences, a desirable foundation model should also encode meaningful statistical relationships between the underlying physical variables. This study evaluates the performance of the state-of-the-art Aurora foundation model in predicting hydrological variables, which were not considered during pretraining. We introduce a lightweight approach using shallow decoders trained on the latent representations of the pretrained model to predict these new variables. As a baseline, we compare this to fine-tuning the full model, which allows further optimization of the latent space while incorporating new variables into both inputs and outputs. The decoder-based approach requires 50% less training time and 35% less memory, while achieving strong accuracy across various hydrological variables and preserving desirable properties of the foundation model, such as autoregressive stability. Notably, decoder accuracy depends on the physical correlation between the new variables and those used during pretraining, indicating that Aurora's latent space captures meaningful physical relationships. In this sense, we argue that an important quality metric for foundation models in Earth sciences is their ability to be extended to new variables without a full fine-tuning. This provides a new perspective for making foundation models more accessible to communities with limited computational resources, while supporting broader adoption in Earth sciences.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 23, 2025

A Comparative Study on Generative Models for High Resolution Solar Observation Imaging

Solar activity is one of the main drivers of variability in our solar system and the key source of space weather phenomena that affect Earth and near Earth space. The extensive record of high resolution extreme ultraviolet (EUV) observations from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) offers an unprecedented, very large dataset of solar images. In this work, we make use of this comprehensive dataset to investigate capabilities of current state-of-the-art generative models to accurately capture the data distribution behind the observed solar activity states. Starting from StyleGAN-based methods, we uncover severe deficits of this model family in handling fine-scale details of solar images when training on high resolution samples, contrary to training on natural face images. When switching to the diffusion based generative model family, we observe strong improvements of fine-scale detail generation. For the GAN family, we are able to achieve similar improvements in fine-scale generation when turning to ProjectedGANs, which uses multi-scale discriminators with a pre-trained frozen feature extractor. We conduct ablation studies to clarify mechanisms responsible for proper fine-scale handling. Using distributed training on supercomputers, we are able to train generative models for up to 1024x1024 resolution that produce high quality samples indistinguishable to human experts, as suggested by the evaluation we conduct. We make all code, models and workflows used in this study publicly available at https://github.com/SLAMPAI/generative-models-for-highres-solar-images.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 14, 2023

Semantic search for 100M+ galaxy images using AI-generated captions

Finding scientifically interesting phenomena through slow, manual labeling campaigns severely limits our ability to explore the billions of galaxy images produced by telescopes. In this work, we develop a pipeline to create a semantic search engine from completely unlabeled image data. Our method leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to generate descriptions for galaxy images, then contrastively aligns a pre-trained multimodal astronomy foundation model with these embedded descriptions to produce searchable embeddings at scale. We find that current VLMs provide descriptions that are sufficiently informative to train a semantic search model that outperforms direct image similarity search. Our model, AION-Search, achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on finding rare phenomena despite training on randomly selected images with no deliberate curation for rare cases. Furthermore, we introduce a VLM-based re-ranking method that nearly doubles the recall for our most challenging targets in the top-100 results. For the first time, AION-Search enables flexible semantic search scalable to 140 million galaxy images, enabling discovery from previously infeasible searches. More broadly, our work provides an approach for making large, unlabeled scientific image archives semantically searchable, expanding data exploration capabilities in fields from Earth observation to microscopy. The code, data, and app are publicly available at https://github.com/NolanKoblischke/AION-Search

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 12, 2025

Bayesian Deep Learning for Exoplanet Atmospheric Retrieval

Over the past decade, the study of extrasolar planets has evolved rapidly from plain detection and identification to comprehensive categorization and characterization of exoplanet systems and their atmospheres. Atmospheric retrieval, the inverse modeling technique used to determine an exoplanetary atmosphere's temperature structure and composition from an observed spectrum, is both time-consuming and compute-intensive, requiring complex algorithms that compare thousands to millions of atmospheric models to the observational data to find the most probable values and associated uncertainties for each model parameter. For rocky, terrestrial planets, the retrieved atmospheric composition can give insight into the surface fluxes of gaseous species necessary to maintain the stability of that atmosphere, which may in turn provide insight into the geological and/or biological processes active on the planet. These atmospheres contain many molecules, some of them biosignatures, spectral fingerprints indicative of biological activity, which will become observable with the next generation of telescopes. Runtimes of traditional retrieval models scale with the number of model parameters, so as more molecular species are considered, runtimes can become prohibitively long. Recent advances in machine learning (ML) and computer vision offer new ways to reduce the time to perform a retrieval by orders of magnitude, given a sufficient data set to train with. Here we present an ML-based retrieval framework called Intelligent exoplaNet Atmospheric RetrievAl (INARA) that consists of a Bayesian deep learning model for retrieval and a data set of 3,000,000 synthetic rocky exoplanetary spectra generated using the NASA Planetary Spectrum Generator. Our work represents the first ML retrieval model for rocky, terrestrial exoplanets and the first synthetic data set of terrestrial spectra generated at this scale.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 8, 2018

Solar Event Tracking with Deep Regression Networks: A Proof of Concept Evaluation

With the advent of deep learning for computer vision tasks, the need for accurately labeled data in large volumes is vital for any application. The increasingly available large amounts of solar image data generated by the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) mission make this domain particularly interesting for the development and testing of deep learning systems. The currently available labeled solar data is generated by the SDO mission's Feature Finding Team's (FFT) specialized detection modules. The major drawback of these modules is that detection and labeling is performed with a cadence of every 4 to 12 hours, depending on the module. Since SDO image data products are created every 10 seconds, there is a considerable gap between labeled observations and the continuous data stream. In order to address this shortcoming, we trained a deep regression network to track the movement of two solar phenomena: Active Region and Coronal Hole events. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt of solar event tracking using a deep learning approach. Since it is impossible to fully evaluate the performance of the suggested event tracks with the original data (only partial ground truth is available), we demonstrate with several metrics the effectiveness of our approach. With the purpose of generating continuously labeled solar image data, we present this feasibility analysis showing the great promise of deep regression networks for this task.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 19, 2019

Bootstrapping World Models from Dynamics Models in Multimodal Foundation Models

To what extent do vision-and-language foundation models possess a realistic world model (observation times action rightarrow observation) and a dynamics model (observation times observation rightarrow action), when actions are expressed through language? While open-source foundation models struggle with both, we find that fine-tuning them to acquire a dynamics model through supervision is significantly easier than acquiring a world model. In turn, dynamics models can be used to bootstrap world models through two main strategies: 1) weakly supervised learning from synthetic data and 2) inference time verification. Firstly, the dynamics model can annotate actions for unlabelled pairs of video frame observations to expand the training data. We further propose a new objective, where image tokens in observation pairs are weighted by their importance, as predicted by a recognition model. Secondly, the dynamics models can assign rewards to multiple samples of the world model to score them, effectively guiding search at inference time. We evaluate the world models resulting from both strategies through the task of action-centric image editing on Aurora-Bench. Our best model achieves a performance competitive with state-of-the-art image editing models, improving on them by a margin of 15% on real-world subsets according to GPT4o-as-judge, and achieving the best average human evaluation across all subsets of Aurora-Bench.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 6, 2025 2

Spider 2.0: Evaluating Language Models on Real-World Enterprise Text-to-SQL Workflows

Real-world enterprise text-to-SQL workflows often involve complex cloud or local data across various database systems, multiple SQL queries in various dialects, and diverse operations from data transformation to analytics. We introduce Spider 2.0, an evaluation framework comprising 632 real-world text-to-SQL workflow problems derived from enterprise-level database use cases. The databases in Spider 2.0 are sourced from real data applications, often containing over 1,000 columns and stored in local or cloud database systems such as BigQuery and Snowflake. We show that solving problems in Spider 2.0 frequently requires understanding and searching through database metadata, dialect documentation, and even project-level codebases. This challenge calls for models to interact with complex SQL workflow environments, process extremely long contexts, perform intricate reasoning, and generate multiple SQL queries with diverse operations, often exceeding 100 lines, which goes far beyond traditional text-to-SQL challenges. Our evaluations indicate that based on o1-preview, our code agent framework successfully solves only 17.0% of the tasks, compared with 91.2% on Spider 1.0 and 73.0% on BIRD. Our results on Spider 2.0 show that while language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in code generation -- especially in prior text-to-SQL benchmarks -- they require significant improvement in order to achieve adequate performance for real-world enterprise usage. Progress on Spider 2.0 represents crucial steps towards developing intelligent, autonomous, code agents for real-world enterprise settings. Our code, baseline models, and data are available at https://spider2-sql.github.io.

  • 16 authors
·
Nov 12, 2024

Video Compression for Spatiotemporal Earth System Data

Large-scale Earth system datasets, from high-resolution remote sensing imagery to spatiotemporal climate model outputs, exhibit characteristics analogous to those of standard videos. Their inherent spatial, temporal, and spectral redundancies can thus be readily exploited by established video compression techniques. Here, we present xarrayvideo, a Python library for compressing multichannel spatiotemporal datasets by encoding them as videos. Our approach achieves compression ratios of up to 250x while maintaining high fidelity by leveraging standard, well-optimized video codecs through ffmpeg. We demonstrate the library's effectiveness on four real-world multichannel spatiotemporal datasets: DynamicEarthNet (very high resolution Planet images), DeepExtremeCubes (high resolution Sentinel-2 images), ERA5 (weather reanalysis data), and the SimpleS2 dataset (high resolution multichannel Sentinel-2 images), achieving Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratios (PSNRs) of 55.86, 40.60, 46.58, and 43.23 dB at 0.1 bits per pixel per band (bpppb) and 65.91, 54.28, 62.90, and 55.04 dB at 1 bpppb. We are redistributing two of these datasets, DeepExtremeCubes (2.3 Tb) and DynamicEarthNet (525 Gb), in the machine-learning-ready and cloud-ready TACO format through HuggingFace at significantly reduced sizes (270 Gb and 8.5 Gb, respectively) without compromising quality (PSNR 55.77-56.65 and 60.15). No performance loss is observed when the compressed versions of these datasets are used in their respective deep learning-based downstream tasks (next step reflectance prediction and landcover segmentation). In conclusion, xarrayvideo presents an efficient solution for handling the rapidly growing size of Earth observation datasets, making advanced compression techniques accessible and practical to the Earth science community. The library is available for use at https://github.com/IPL-UV/xarrayvideo

AGBD: A Global-scale Biomass Dataset

Accurate estimates of Above Ground Biomass (AGB) are essential in addressing two of humanity's biggest challenges, climate change and biodiversity loss. Existing datasets for AGB estimation from satellite imagery are limited. Either they focus on specific, local regions at high resolution, or they offer global coverage at low resolution. There is a need for a machine learning-ready, globally representative, high-resolution benchmark. Our findings indicate significant variability in biomass estimates across different vegetation types, emphasizing the necessity for a dataset that accurately captures global diversity. To address these gaps, we introduce a comprehensive new dataset that is globally distributed, covers a range of vegetation types, and spans several years. This dataset combines AGB reference data from the GEDI mission with data from Sentinel-2 and PALSAR-2 imagery. Additionally, it includes pre-processed high-level features such as a dense canopy height map, an elevation map, and a land-cover classification map. We also produce a dense, high-resolution (10m) map of AGB predictions for the entire area covered by the dataset. Rigorously tested, our dataset is accompanied by several benchmark models and is publicly available. It can be easily accessed using a single line of code, offering a solid basis for efforts towards global AGB estimation. The GitHub repository github.com/ghjuliasialelli/AGBD serves as a one-stop shop for all code and data.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 7, 2024

Size and Shape Constraints of (486958) Arrokoth from Stellar Occultations

We present the results from four stellar occultations by (486958) Arrokoth, the flyby target of the New Horizons extended mission. Three of the four efforts led to positive detections of the body, and all constrained the presence of rings and other debris, finding none. Twenty-five mobile stations were deployed for 2017 June 3 and augmented by fixed telescopes. There were no positive detections from this effort. The event on 2017 July 10 was observed by SOFIA with one very short chord. Twenty-four deployed stations on 2017 July 17 resulted in five chords that clearly showed a complicated shape consistent with a contact binary with rough dimensions of 20 by 30 km for the overall outline. A visible albedo of 10% was derived from these data. Twenty-two systems were deployed for the fourth event on 2018 Aug 4 and resulted in two chords. The combination of the occultation data and the flyby results provides a significant refinement of the rotation period, now estimated to be 15.9380 pm 0.0005 hours. The occultation data also provided high-precision astrometric constraints on the position of the object that were crucial for supporting the navigation for the New Horizons flyby. This work demonstrates an effective method for obtaining detailed size and shape information and probing for rings and dust on distant Kuiper Belt objects as well as being an important source of positional data that can aid in spacecraft navigation that is particularly useful for small and distant bodies.

  • 133 authors
·
Dec 31, 2019

Kosmos: An AI Scientist for Autonomous Discovery

Data-driven scientific discovery requires iterative cycles of literature search, hypothesis generation, and data analysis. Substantial progress has been made towards AI agents that can automate scientific research, but all such agents remain limited in the number of actions they can take before losing coherence, thus limiting the depth of their findings. Here we present Kosmos, an AI scientist that automates data-driven discovery. Given an open-ended objective and a dataset, Kosmos runs for up to 12 hours performing cycles of parallel data analysis, literature search, and hypothesis generation before synthesizing discoveries into scientific reports. Unlike prior systems, Kosmos uses a structured world model to share information between a data analysis agent and a literature search agent. The world model enables Kosmos to coherently pursue the specified objective over 200 agent rollouts, collectively executing an average of 42,000 lines of code and reading 1,500 papers per run. Kosmos cites all statements in its reports with code or primary literature, ensuring its reasoning is traceable. Independent scientists found 79.4% of statements in Kosmos reports to be accurate, and collaborators reported that a single 20-cycle Kosmos run performed the equivalent of 6 months of their own research time on average. Furthermore, collaborators reported that the number of valuable scientific findings generated scales linearly with Kosmos cycles (tested up to 20 cycles). We highlight seven discoveries made by Kosmos that span metabolomics, materials science, neuroscience, and statistical genetics. Three discoveries independently reproduce findings from preprinted or unpublished manuscripts that were not accessed by Kosmos at runtime, while four make novel contributions to the scientific literature.

  • 37 authors
·
Nov 4, 2025

3D radio data visualisation in open science platforms for next-generation observatories

Next-generation telescopes will bring groundbreaking discoveries but they will also present new technological challenges. The Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) will be one of the most demanding scientific infrastructures, with a projected data output of 700 PB per year to be distributed to a network of SKA Regional Centres. Current tools are not fully suited to manage such massive data volumes, therefore, new research is required to transform science archives from data providers into service providers. In this paper we examine how a science archive can deliver advanced visualisation capabilities for the SKA science archive. In particular, we have conducted a thorough exploration of existing visualisation software for astronomy and other fields to identify tools capable of addressing Big Data requirements. Using selected technologies, we have developed a prototype archive that provides access to interactive visualisations of 3D radio data through web-based interfaces, adhering to International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) recommendations to favour interoperability and Open Science practices. In addition, we discuss how current IVOA recommendations support these visualisation capabilities and how they could be expanded. Our prototype archive includes a service to generate 3D models on the fly as a server operation, enabling remote visualisations in a flexible manner; for instance, a set of parameters can be used to customise the models and their visualisation. We have used SKA precursor and pathfinder data to test its usability and scalability, concluding that remote visualisation is a viable solution for handling high-volume data. However, our prototype is constrained by memory limitations, requiring techniques to reduce memory usage.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 20, 2025

Real-Time Long Horizon Air Quality Forecasting via Group-Relative Policy Optimization

Accurate long horizon forecasting of particulate matter (PM) concentration fields is essential for operational public health decisions. However, achieving reliable forecasts remains challenging in regions with complex terrain and strong atmospheric dynamics such as East Asia. While foundation models such as Aurora offer global generality, they often miss region-specific dynamics and rely on non-real-time inputs, limiting their practical utility for localized warning systems. To address this gap, we construct and release the real-world observations and high-resolution CMAQ-OBS dataset for East Asia, reducing regional error by 59.5% and enabling real-time 48-120 hour forecasts critical for public health alerts. However, standard point-wise objectives cannot reflect asymmetric operational costs, where false alarms deteriorate public trust while missed severe events endanger populations. This cost mismatch causes SFT models to over-predict and yield high False Alarm Rates. We introduce Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with class-wise rewards and curriculum rollout to align predictions with operational priorities. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves the reliability of the forecast. Compared to the SFT-only baseline, our model reduces the False Alarm Rate by 47.3% while achieving a competitive F1-score, proving its effectiveness for practical, real-world air quality forecasting systems on long lead time scenarios.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 27, 2025

Lessons Learned from the 1st ARIEL Machine Learning Challenge: Correcting Transiting Exoplanet Light Curves for Stellar Spots

The last decade has witnessed a rapid growth of the field of exoplanet discovery and characterisation. However, several big challenges remain, many of which could be addressed using machine learning methodology. For instance, the most prolific method for detecting exoplanets and inferring several of their characteristics, transit photometry, is very sensitive to the presence of stellar spots. The current practice in the literature is to identify the effects of spots visually and correct for them manually or discard the affected data. This paper explores a first step towards fully automating the efficient and precise derivation of transit depths from transit light curves in the presence of stellar spots. The methods and results we present were obtained in the context of the 1st Machine Learning Challenge organized for the European Space Agency's upcoming Ariel mission. We first present the problem, the simulated Ariel-like data and outline the Challenge while identifying best practices for organizing similar challenges in the future. Finally, we present the solutions obtained by the top-5 winning teams, provide their code and discuss their implications. Successful solutions either construct highly non-linear (w.r.t. the raw data) models with minimal preprocessing -deep neural networks and ensemble methods- or amount to obtaining meaningful statistics from the light curves, constructing linear models on which yields comparably good predictive performance.

  • 23 authors
·
Oct 29, 2020

M3LEO: A Multi-Modal, Multi-Label Earth Observation Dataset Integrating Interferometric SAR and Multispectral Data

Satellite-based remote sensing has revolutionised the way we address global challenges. Huge quantities of Earth Observation (EO) data are generated by satellite sensors daily, but processing these large datasets for use in ML pipelines is technically and computationally challenging. While some preprocessed Earth observation datasets exist, their content is often limited to optical or near-optical wavelength data, which is ineffective at night or in adverse weather conditions. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), an active sensing technique based on microwave length radiation, offers a viable alternative. However, the application of machine learning to SAR has been limited due to a lack of ML-ready data and pipelines, particularly for the full diversity of SAR data, including polarimetry, coherence and interferometry. In this work, we introduce M3LEO, a multi-modal, multi-label Earth observation dataset that includes polarimetric, interferometric, and coherence SAR data derived from Sentinel-1, alongside multispectral Sentinel-2 imagery and auxiliary data describing terrain properties such as land use. M3LEO spans approximately 17M 4x4 km data chips from six diverse geographic regions. The dataset is complemented by a flexible PyTorch Lightning framework configured using Hydra to accommodate its use across diverse ML applications in Earth observation. We provide tools to process any dataset available on popular platforms such as Google Earth Engine for seamless integration with our framework. We show that the distribution shift in self-supervised embeddings is substantial across geographic regions, even when controlling for terrain properties. Data: huggingface.co/M3LEO, Code: github.com/spaceml-org/M3LEO.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 6, 2024

Learning Action and Reasoning-Centric Image Editing from Videos and Simulations

An image editing model should be able to perform diverse edits, ranging from object replacement, changing attributes or style, to performing actions or movement, which require many forms of reasoning. Current general instruction-guided editing models have significant shortcomings with action and reasoning-centric edits. Object, attribute or stylistic changes can be learned from visually static datasets. On the other hand, high-quality data for action and reasoning-centric edits is scarce and has to come from entirely different sources that cover e.g. physical dynamics, temporality and spatial reasoning. To this end, we meticulously curate the AURORA Dataset (Action-Reasoning-Object-Attribute), a collection of high-quality training data, human-annotated and curated from videos and simulation engines. We focus on a key aspect of quality training data: triplets (source image, prompt, target image) contain a single meaningful visual change described by the prompt, i.e., truly minimal changes between source and target images. To demonstrate the value of our dataset, we evaluate an AURORA-finetuned model on a new expert-curated benchmark (AURORA-Bench) covering 8 diverse editing tasks. Our model significantly outperforms previous editing models as judged by human raters. For automatic evaluations, we find important flaws in previous metrics and caution their use for semantically hard editing tasks. Instead, we propose a new automatic metric that focuses on discriminative understanding. We hope that our efforts : (1) curating a quality training dataset and an evaluation benchmark, (2) developing critical evaluations, and (3) releasing a state-of-the-art model, will fuel further progress on general image editing.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 3, 2024 2

GeoGalactica: A Scientific Large Language Model in Geoscience

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved huge success for their general knowledge and ability to solve a wide spectrum of tasks in natural language processing (NLP). Due to their impressive abilities, LLMs have shed light on potential inter-discipline applications to foster scientific discoveries of a specific domain by using artificial intelligence (AI for science, AI4S). In the meantime, utilizing NLP techniques in geoscience research and practice is wide and convoluted, contributing from knowledge extraction and document classification to question answering and knowledge discovery. In this work, we take the initial step to leverage LLM for science, through a rather straightforward approach. We try to specialize an LLM into geoscience, by further pre-training the model with a vast amount of texts in geoscience, as well as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) the resulting model with our custom collected instruction tuning dataset. These efforts result in a model GeoGalactica consisting of 30 billion parameters. To our best knowledge, it is the largest language model for the geoscience domain. More specifically, GeoGalactica is from further pre-training of Galactica. We train GeoGalactica over a geoscience-related text corpus containing 65 billion tokens curated from extensive data sources in the big science project Deep-time Digital Earth (DDE), preserving as the largest geoscience-specific text corpus. Then we fine-tune the model with 1 million pairs of instruction-tuning data consisting of questions that demand professional geoscience knowledge to answer. In this technical report, we will illustrate in detail all aspects of GeoGalactica, including data collection, data cleaning, base model selection, pre-training, SFT, and evaluation. We open-source our data curation tools and the checkpoints of GeoGalactica during the first 3/4 of pre-training.

  • 23 authors
·
Dec 31, 2023 2

Encapsulating Textual Contents into a MOC data Structure for Advanced Applications

Context. The Multi-Order Coverage map (MOC) is a widely adopted standard promoted by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) to support data sharing and interoperability within the Virtual Observatory (VO) ecosystem. This hierarchical data structure efficiently encodes and visualizes irregularly shaped regions of the sky, enabling applications such as cross-matching large astronomical catalogs. Aims. This study aims to explore potential enhancements to the MOC data structure by encapsulating textual descriptions and semantic embeddings into sky regions. Specifically, we introduce "Textual MOCs", in which textual content is encapsulated, and "Semantic MOCs" that transform textual content into semantic embeddings. These enhancements are designed to enable advanced operations such as similarity searches and complex queries and to integrate with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools. Method. We experimented with Textual MOCs by annotating detailed descriptions directly into the MOC sky regions, enriching the maps with contextual information suitable for interactive learning tools. For Semantic MOCs, we converted the textual content into semantic embeddings, numerical representations capturing textual meanings in multidimensional spaces, and stored them in high-dimensional vector databases optimized for efficient retrieval. Results. The implementation of Textual MOCs enhances user engagement by providing meaningful descriptions within sky regions. Semantic MOCs enable sophisticated query capabilities, such as similarity-based searches and context-aware data retrieval. Integration with multimodal generative AI systems allows for more accurate and contextually relevant interactions supporting both spatial, semantic and visual operations for advancing astronomical data analysis capabilities.

  • 15 authors
·
Oct 14, 2025

Particle Trajectory Representation Learning with Masked Point Modeling

Effective self-supervised learning (SSL) techniques have been key to unlocking large datasets for representation learning. While many promising methods have been developed using online corpora and captioned photographs, their application to scientific domains, where data encodes highly specialized knowledge, remains a challenge. Liquid Argon Time Projection Chambers (LArTPCs) provide high-resolution 3D imaging for fundamental physics, but analysis of their sparse, complex point cloud data often relies on supervised methods trained on large simulations, introducing potential biases. We introduce the Point-based Liquid Argon Masked Autoencoder (PoLAr-MAE), applying masked point modeling to unlabeled LArTPC images using domain-specific volumetric tokenization and energy prediction. We show this SSL approach learns physically meaningful trajectory representations directly from data. This yields remarkable data efficiency: fine-tuning on just 100 labeled events achieves track/shower semantic segmentation performance comparable to the state-of-the-art supervised baseline trained on >100,000 events. Furthermore, internal attention maps exhibit emergent instance segmentation of particle trajectories. While challenges remain, particularly for fine-grained features, we make concrete SSL's potential for building a foundation model for LArTPC image analysis capable of serving as a common base for all data reconstruction tasks. To facilitate further progress, we release PILArNet-M, a large dataset of 1M LArTPC events. Project site: https://youngsm.com/polarmae.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 4, 2025

ChatEarthNet: A Global-Scale Image-Text Dataset Empowering Vision-Language Geo-Foundation Models

An in-depth comprehension of global land cover is essential in Earth observation, forming the foundation for a multitude of applications. Although remote sensing technology has advanced rapidly, leading to a proliferation of satellite imagery, the inherent complexity of these images often makes them difficult for non-expert users to understand. Natural language, as a carrier of human knowledge, can be a bridge between common users and complicated satellite imagery. In this context, we introduce a global-scale, high-quality image-text dataset for remote sensing, providing natural language descriptions for Sentinel-2 data to facilitate the understanding of satellite imagery for common users. Specifically, we utilize Sentinel-2 data for its global coverage as the foundational image source, employing semantic segmentation labels from the European Space Agency's (ESA) WorldCover project to enrich the descriptions of land covers. By conducting in-depth semantic analysis, we formulate detailed prompts to elicit rich descriptions from ChatGPT. To enhance the dataset's quality, we introduce the manual verification process. This step involves manual inspection and correction to refine the dataset, thus significantly improving its accuracy and quality. Finally, we offer the community ChatEarthNet, a large-scale image-text dataset characterized by global coverage, high quality, wide-ranging diversity, and detailed descriptions. ChatEarthNet consists of 163,488 image-text pairs with captions generated by ChatGPT-3.5 and an additional 10,000 image-text pairs with captions generated by ChatGPT-4V(ision). This dataset has significant potential for training vision-language geo-foundation models and evaluating large vision-language models for remote sensing. The dataset will be made publicly available.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 17, 2024

Harnessing the Hubble Space Telescope Archives: A Catalogue of 21,926 Interacting Galaxies

Mergers play a complex role in galaxy formation and evolution. Continuing to improve our understanding of these systems require ever larger samples, which can be difficult (even impossible) to select from individual surveys. We use the new platform ESA Datalabs to assemble a catalogue of interacting galaxies from the Hubble Space Telescope science archives; this catalogue is larger than previously published catalogues by nearly an order of magnitude. In particular, we apply the Zoobot convolutional neural network directly to the entire public archive of HST F814W images and make probabilistic interaction predictions for 126 million sources from the Hubble Source Catalogue. We employ a combination of automated visual representation and visual analysis to identify a clean sample of 21,926 interacting galaxy systems, mostly with z < 1. Sixty five percent of these systems have no previous references in either the NASA Extragalactic Database or Simbad. In the process of removing contamination, we also discover many other objects of interest, such as gravitational lenses, edge-on protoplanetary disks, and `backlit' overlapping galaxies. We briefly investigate the basic properties of this sample, and we make our catalogue publicly available for use by the community. In addition to providing a new catalogue of scientifically interesting objects imaged by HST, this work also demonstrates the power of the ESA Datalabs tool to facilitate substantial archival analysis without placing a high computational or storage burden on the end user.

  • 16 authors
·
Mar 1, 2023

The AI Cosmologist I: An Agentic System for Automated Data Analysis

We present the AI Cosmologist, an agentic system designed to automate cosmological/astronomical data analysis and machine learning research workflows. This implements a complete pipeline from idea generation to experimental evaluation and research dissemination, mimicking the scientific process typically performed by human researchers. The system employs specialized agents for planning, coding, execution, analysis, and synthesis that work together to develop novel approaches. Unlike traditional auto machine-learning systems, the AI Cosmologist generates diverse implementation strategies, writes complete code, handles execution errors, analyzes results, and synthesizes new approaches based on experimental outcomes. We demonstrate the AI Cosmologist capabilities across several machine learning tasks, showing how it can successfully explore solution spaces, iterate based on experimental results, and combine successful elements from different approaches. Our results indicate that agentic systems can automate portions of the research process, potentially accelerating scientific discovery. The code and experimental data used in this paper are available on GitHub at https://github.com/adammoss/aicosmologist. Example papers included in the appendix demonstrate the system's capability to autonomously produce complete scientific publications, starting from only the dataset and task description

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 4, 2025

A New Dataset and Performance Benchmark for Real-time Spacecraft Segmentation in Onboard Flight Computers

Spacecraft deployed in outer space are routinely subjected to various forms of damage due to exposure to hazardous environments. In addition, there are significant risks to the subsequent process of in-space repairs through human extravehicular activity or robotic manipulation, incurring substantial operational costs. Recent developments in image segmentation could enable the development of reliable and cost-effective autonomous inspection systems. While these models often require large amounts of training data to achieve satisfactory results, publicly available annotated spacecraft segmentation data are very scarce. Here, we present a new dataset of nearly 64k annotated spacecraft images that was created using real spacecraft models, superimposed on a mixture of real and synthetic backgrounds generated using NASA's TTALOS pipeline. To mimic camera distortions and noise in real-world image acquisition, we also added different types of noise and distortion to the images. Finally, we finetuned YOLOv8 and YOLOv11 segmentation models to generate performance benchmarks for the dataset under well-defined hardware and inference time constraints to mimic real-world image segmentation challenges for real-time onboard applications in space on NASA's inspector spacecraft. The resulting models, when tested under these constraints, achieved a Dice score of 0.92, Hausdorff distance of 0.69, and an inference time of about 0.5 second. The dataset and models for performance benchmark are available at https://github.com/RiceD2KLab/SWiM.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 14, 2025

INDUS: Effective and Efficient Language Models for Scientific Applications

Large language models (LLMs) trained on general domain corpora showed remarkable results on natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, previous research demonstrated LLMs trained using domain-focused corpora perform better on specialized tasks. Inspired by this pivotal insight, we developed INDUS, a comprehensive suite of LLMs tailored for the Earth science, biology, physics, heliophysics, planetary sciences and astrophysics domains and trained using curated scientific corpora drawn from diverse data sources. The suite of models include: (1) an encoder model trained using domain-specific vocabulary and corpora to address natural language understanding tasks, (2) a contrastive-learning-based general text embedding model trained using a diverse set of datasets drawn from multiple sources to address information retrieval tasks and (3) smaller versions of these models created using knowledge distillation techniques to address applications which have latency or resource constraints. We also created three new scientific benchmark datasets namely, CLIMATE-CHANGE-NER (entity-recognition), NASA-QA (extractive QA) and NASA-IR (IR) to accelerate research in these multi-disciplinary fields. Finally, we show that our models outperform both general-purpose encoders (RoBERTa) and existing domain-specific encoders (SciBERT) on these new tasks as well as existing benchmark tasks in the domains of interest.

  • 34 authors
·
May 17, 2024 1

GeoPlant: Spatial Plant Species Prediction Dataset

The difficulty of monitoring biodiversity at fine scales and over large areas limits ecological knowledge and conservation efforts. To fill this gap, Species Distribution Models (SDMs) predict species across space from spatially explicit features. Yet, they face the challenge of integrating the rich but heterogeneous data made available over the past decade, notably millions of opportunistic species observations and standardized surveys, as well as multi-modal remote sensing data. In light of that, we have designed and developed a new European-scale dataset for SDMs at high spatial resolution (10-50 m), including more than 10k species (i.e., most of the European flora). The dataset comprises 5M heterogeneous Presence-Only records and 90k exhaustive Presence-Absence survey records, all accompanied by diverse environmental rasters (e.g., elevation, human footprint, and soil) that are traditionally used in SDMs. In addition, it provides Sentinel-2 RGB and NIR satellite images with 10 m resolution, a 20-year time-series of climatic variables, and satellite time-series from the Landsat program. In addition to the data, we provide an openly accessible SDM benchmark (hosted on Kaggle), which has already attracted an active community and a set of strong baselines for single predictor/modality and multimodal approaches. All resources, e.g., the dataset, pre-trained models, and baseline methods (in the form of notebooks), are available on Kaggle, allowing one to start with our dataset literally with two mouse clicks.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 25, 2024

Prithvi-EO-2.0: A Versatile Multi-Temporal Foundation Model for Earth Observation Applications

This technical report presents Prithvi-EO-2.0, a new geospatial foundation model that offers significant improvements over its predecessor, Prithvi-EO-1.0. Trained on 4.2M global time series samples from NASA's Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 data archive at 30m resolution, the new 300M and 600M parameter models incorporate temporal and location embeddings for enhanced performance across various geospatial tasks. Through extensive benchmarking with GEO-Bench, the 600M version outperforms the previous Prithvi-EO model by 8\% across a range of tasks. It also outperforms six other geospatial foundation models when benchmarked on remote sensing tasks from different domains and resolutions (i.e. from 0.1m to 15m). The results demonstrate the versatility of the model in both classical earth observation and high-resolution applications. Early involvement of end-users and subject matter experts (SMEs) are among the key factors that contributed to the project's success. In particular, SME involvement allowed for constant feedback on model and dataset design, as well as successful customization for diverse SME-led applications in disaster response, land use and crop mapping, and ecosystem dynamics monitoring. Prithvi-EO-2.0 is available on Hugging Face and IBM terratorch, with additional resources on GitHub. The project exemplifies the Trusted Open Science approach embraced by all involved organizations.

  • 32 authors
·
Dec 3, 2024

The chemical inventory of the planet-hosting disk PDS 70

As host to two accreting planets, PDS 70 provides a unique opportunity to probe the chemical complexity of atmosphere-forming material. We present ALMA Band 6 observations of the PDS~70 disk and report the first chemical inventory of the system. With a spatial resolution of 0.4''-0.5'' (sim50 au), 12 species are detected, including CO isotopologues and formaldehyde, small hydrocarbons, HCN and HCO+ isotopologues, and S-bearing molecules. SO and CH3OH are not detected. All lines show a large cavity at the center of the disk, indicative of the deep gap carved by the massive planets. The radial profiles of the line emission are compared to the (sub-)mm continuum and infrared scattered light intensity profiles. Different molecular transitions peak at different radii, revealing the complex interplay between density, temperature and chemistry in setting molecular abundances. Column densities and optical depth profiles are derived for all detected molecules, and upper limits obtained for the non detections. Excitation temperature is obtained for H2CO. Deuteration and nitrogen fractionation profiles from the hydro-cyanide lines show radially increasing fractionation levels. Comparison of the disk chemical inventory to grids of chemical models from the literature strongly suggests a disk molecular layer hosting a carbon to oxygen ratio C/O>1, thus providing for the first time compelling evidence of planets actively accreting high C/O ratio gas at present time.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 20, 2021

Chemical abundances and kinematics of 257 G-, K-type field giants. Setting a base for further analysis of giant-planet properties orbiting evolved stars

We performed a uniform and detailed abundance analysis of 12 refractory elements (Na, Mg, Al, Si, Ca, Ti, Cr, Ni, Co, Sc, Mn, and V) for a sample of 257 G- and K-type evolved stars from the CORALIE planet search program. To date, only one of these stars is known to harbor a planetary companion. We aimed to characterize this large sample of evolved stars in terms of chemical abundances and kinematics, thus setting a solid base for further analysis of planetary properties around giant stars. This sample, being homogeneously analyzed, can be used as a comparison sample for other planet-related studies, as well as for different type of studies related to stellar and Galaxy astrophysics. The abundances of the chemical elements were determined using an LTE abundance analysis relative to the Sun, with the spectral synthesis code MOOG and a grid of Kurucz ATLAS9 atmospheres. To separate the Galactic stellar populations both a purely kinematical approach and a chemical method were applied. We confirm the overabundance of Na in giant stars compared to the field FGK dwarfs. This enhancement might have a stellar evolutionary character, but departures from LTE may also produce a similar enhancement. Our chemical separation of stellar populations also suggests a "gap" in metallicity between the thick-disk and high-alpha metal-rich stars, as previously observed in dwarfs sample from HARPS. The present sample, as most of the giant star samples, also suffers from the B - V colour cut-off, which excludes low-log g stars with high metallicities, and high-logg star with low-[Fe/H]. For future studies of planet occurrence dependence on stellar metallicity around these evolved stars we suggest to use a sub-sample of stars in a "cut-rectangle" in the logg - [Fe/H] diagram to overcome the aforementioned issue.

  • 12 authors
·
Mar 28, 2015

ADIEE: Automatic Dataset Creation and Scorer for Instruction-Guided Image Editing Evaluation

Recent advances in instruction-guided image editing underscore the need for effective automated evaluation. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been explored as judges, open-source models struggle with alignment, and proprietary models lack transparency and cost efficiency. Additionally, no public training datasets exist to fine-tune open-source VLMs, only small benchmarks with diverse evaluation schemes. To address this, we introduce ADIEE, an automated dataset creation approach which is then used to train a scoring model for instruction-guided image editing evaluation. We generate a large-scale dataset with over 100K samples and use it to fine-tune a LLaVA-NeXT-8B model modified to decode a numeric score from a custom token. The resulting scorer outperforms all open-source VLMs and Gemini-Pro 1.5 across all benchmarks, achieving a 0.0696 (+17.24%) gain in score correlation with human ratings on AURORA-Bench, and improving pair-wise comparison accuracy by 4.03% (+7.21%) on GenAI-Bench and 4.75% (+9.35%) on AURORA-Bench, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art. The scorer can act as a reward model, enabling automated best edit selection and model fine-tuning. Notably, the proposed scorer can boost MagicBrush model's average evaluation score on ImagenHub from 5.90 to 6.43 (+8.98%). Our code and models are available at https://github.com/SherryXTChen/ADIEE.git.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 9, 2025

pathfinder: A Semantic Framework for Literature Review and Knowledge Discovery in Astronomy

The exponential growth of astronomical literature poses significant challenges for researchers navigating and synthesizing general insights or even domain-specific knowledge. We present Pathfinder, a machine learning framework designed to enable literature review and knowledge discovery in astronomy, focusing on semantic searching with natural language instead of syntactic searches with keywords. Utilizing state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) and a corpus of 350,000 peer-reviewed papers from the Astrophysics Data System (ADS), Pathfinder offers an innovative approach to scientific inquiry and literature exploration. Our framework couples advanced retrieval techniques with LLM-based synthesis to search astronomical literature by semantic context as a complement to currently existing methods that use keywords or citation graphs. It addresses complexities of jargon, named entities, and temporal aspects through time-based and citation-based weighting schemes. We demonstrate the tool's versatility through case studies, showcasing its application in various research scenarios. The system's performance is evaluated using custom benchmarks, including single-paper and multi-paper tasks. Beyond literature review, Pathfinder offers unique capabilities for reformatting answers in ways that are accessible to various audiences (e.g. in a different language or as simplified text), visualizing research landscapes, and tracking the impact of observatories and methodologies. This tool represents a significant advancement in applying AI to astronomical research, aiding researchers at all career stages in navigating modern astronomy literature.

  • 30 authors
·
Aug 2, 2024

Scaling-Up the Pretraining of the Earth Observation Foundation Model PhilEO to the MajorTOM Dataset

Today, Earth Observation (EO) satellites generate massive volumes of data, with the Copernicus Sentinel-2 constellation alone producing approximately 1.6TB per day. To fully exploit this information, it is essential to pretrain EO Foundation Models (FMs) on large unlabeled datasets, enabling efficient fine-tuning for several different downstream tasks with minimal labeled data. In this work, we present the scaling-up of our recently proposed EO Foundation Model, PhilEO Geo-Aware U-Net, on the unlabeled 23TB dataset MajorTOM, which covers the vast majority of the Earth's surface, as well as on the specialized subset FastTOM 2TB that does not include oceans and ice. We develop and study various PhilEO model variants with different numbers of parameters and architectures. Finally, we fine-tune the models on the PhilEO Bench for road density estimation, building density pixel-wise regression, and land cover semantic segmentation, and we evaluate the performance. Our results demonstrate that for all n-shots for road density regression, the PhilEO 44M MajorTOM 23TB model outperforms PhilEO Globe 0.5TB 44M. We also show that for most n-shots for road density estimation and building density regression, PhilEO 200M FastTOM outperforms all the other models. The effectiveness of both dataset and model scaling is validated using the PhilEO Bench. We also study the impact of architecture scaling, transitioning from U-Net Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to Vision Transformers (ViT).

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 17, 2025

MCTED: A Machine-Learning-Ready Dataset for Digital Elevation Model Generation From Mars Imagery

This work presents a new dataset for the Martian digital elevation model prediction task, ready for machine learning applications called MCTED. The dataset has been generated using a comprehensive pipeline designed to process high-resolution Mars orthoimage and DEM pairs from Day et al., yielding a dataset consisting of 80,898 data samples. The source images are data gathered by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using the CTX instrument, providing a very diverse and comprehensive coverage of the Martian surface. Given the complexity of the processing pipelines used in large-scale DEMs, there are often artefacts and missing data points in the original data, for which we developed tools to solve or mitigate their impact. We divide the processed samples into training and validation splits, ensuring samples in both splits cover no mutual areas to avoid data leakage. Every sample in the dataset is represented by the optical image patch, DEM patch, and two mask patches, indicating values that were originally missing or were altered by us. This allows future users of the dataset to handle altered elevation regions as they please. We provide statistical insights of the generated dataset, including the spatial distribution of samples, the distributions of elevation values, slopes and more. Finally, we train a small U-Net architecture on the MCTED dataset and compare its performance to a monocular depth estimation foundation model, DepthAnythingV2, on the task of elevation prediction. We find that even a very small architecture trained on this dataset specifically, beats a zero-shot performance of a depth estimation foundation model like DepthAnythingV2. We make the dataset and code used for its generation completely open source in public repositories.

ESA-Datalabs ESA Datalabs
·
Sep 9, 2025

Analyzing Data Quality and Decay in Mega-Constellations: A Physics-Informed Machine Learning Approach

In the era of mega-constellations, the need for accurate and publicly available information has become fundamental for satellite operators to guarantee the safety of spacecrafts and the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) space environment. This study critically evaluates the accuracy and reliability of publicly available ephemeris data for a LEO mega-constellation - Starlink. The goal of this work is twofold: (i) compare and analyze the quality of the data against high-precision numerical propagation. (ii) Leverage Physics-Informed Machine Learning to extract relevant satellite quantities, such as non-conservative forces, during the decay process. By analyzing two months of real orbital data for approximately 1500 Starlink satellites, we identify discrepancies between high precision numerical algorithms and the published ephemerides, recognizing the use of simplified dynamics at fixed thresholds, planned maneuvers, and limitations in uncertainty propagations. Furthermore, we compare data obtained from multiple sources to track and analyze deorbiting satellites over the same period. Empirically, we extract the acceleration profile of satellites during deorbiting and provide insights relating to the effects of non-conservative forces during reentry. For non-deorbiting satellites, the position Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) was approximately 300 m, while for deorbiting satellites it increased to about 600 m. Through this in-depth analysis, we highlight potential limitations in publicly available data for accurate and robust Space Situational Awareness (SSA), and importantly, we propose a data-driven model of satellite decay in mega-constellations.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 13, 2025

SpecCLIP: Aligning and Translating Spectroscopic Measurements for Stars

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have transformed natural language understanding through vast datasets and large-scale parameterization. Inspired by this success, we present SpecCLIP, a foundation model framework that extends LLM-inspired methodologies to stellar spectral analysis. Stellar spectra, akin to structured language, encode rich physical and chemical information about stars. By training foundation models on large-scale spectral datasets, our goal is to learn robust and informative embeddings that support diverse downstream applications. As a proof of concept, SpecCLIP involves pre-training on two spectral types--LAMOST low-resolution and Gaia XP--followed by contrastive alignment using the CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) framework, adapted to associate spectra from different instruments. This alignment is complemented by auxiliary decoders that preserve spectrum-specific information and enable translation (prediction) between spectral types, with the former achieved by maximizing mutual information between embeddings and input spectra. The result is a cross-spectrum framework enabling intrinsic calibration and flexible applications across instruments. We demonstrate that fine-tuning these models on moderate-sized labeled datasets improves adaptability to tasks such as stellar-parameter estimation and chemical-abundance determination. SpecCLIP also enhances the accuracy and precision of parameter estimates benchmarked against external survey data. Additionally, its similarity search and cross-spectrum prediction capabilities offer potential for anomaly detection. Our results suggest that contrastively trained foundation models enriched with spectrum-aware decoders can advance precision stellar spectroscopy.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 2, 2025

The AI Scientist-v2: Workshop-Level Automated Scientific Discovery via Agentic Tree Search

AI is increasingly playing a pivotal role in transforming how scientific discoveries are made. We introduce The AI Scientist-v2, an end-to-end agentic system capable of producing the first entirely AI generated peer-review-accepted workshop paper. This system iteratively formulates scientific hypotheses, designs and executes experiments, analyzes and visualizes data, and autonomously authors scientific manuscripts. Compared to its predecessor (v1, Lu et al., 2024 arXiv:2408.06292), The AI Scientist-v2 eliminates the reliance on human-authored code templates, generalizes effectively across diverse machine learning domains, and leverages a novel progressive agentic tree-search methodology managed by a dedicated experiment manager agent. Additionally, we enhance the AI reviewer component by integrating a Vision-Language Model (VLM) feedback loop for iterative refinement of content and aesthetics of the figures. We evaluated The AI Scientist-v2 by submitting three fully autonomous manuscripts to a peer-reviewed ICLR workshop. Notably, one manuscript achieved high enough scores to exceed the average human acceptance threshold, marking the first instance of a fully AI-generated paper successfully navigating a peer review. This accomplishment highlights the growing capability of AI in conducting all aspects of scientific research. We anticipate that further advancements in autonomous scientific discovery technologies will profoundly impact human knowledge generation, enabling unprecedented scalability in research productivity and significantly accelerating scientific breakthroughs, greatly benefiting society at large. We have open-sourced the code at https://github.com/SakanaAI/AI-Scientist-v2 to foster the future development of this transformative technology. We also discuss the role of AI in science, including AI safety.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 10, 2025 3

Text2Earth: Unlocking Text-driven Remote Sensing Image Generation with a Global-Scale Dataset and a Foundation Model

Generative foundation models have advanced large-scale text-driven natural image generation, becoming a prominent research trend across various vertical domains. However, in the remote sensing field, there is still a lack of research on large-scale text-to-image (text2image) generation technology. Existing remote sensing image-text datasets are small in scale and confined to specific geographic areas and scene types. Besides, existing text2image methods have struggled to achieve global-scale, multi-resolution controllable, and unbounded image generation. To address these challenges, this paper presents two key contributions: the Git-10M dataset and the Text2Earth foundation model. Git-10M is a global-scale image-text dataset comprising 10 million image-text pairs, 5 times larger than the previous largest one. The dataset covers a wide range of geographic scenes and contains resolution information, significantly surpassing existing datasets in both size and diversity. Building on Git-10M, we propose Text2Earth, a 1.3 billion parameter generative foundation model based on the diffusion framework to model global-scale remote sensing scenes. Text2Earth integrates a resolution guidance mechanism, enabling users to specify image resolutions. A dynamic condition adaptation strategy is proposed for training and inference to improve image quality. Text2Earth excels in zero-shot text2image generation and demonstrates robust generalization and flexibility across multiple tasks, including unbounded scene construction, image editing, and cross-modal image generation. This robust capability surpasses previous models restricted to the basic fixed size and limited scene types. On the previous benchmark dataset, Text2Earth outperforms previous models with an improvement of +26.23 FID and +20.95% Zero-shot Cls-OA metric.Our project page is https://chen-yang-liu.github.io/Text2Earth

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 1, 2025

Optimizing Methane Detection On Board Satellites: Speed, Accuracy, and Low-Power Solutions for Resource-Constrained Hardware

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and detecting its leaks early via hyperspectral satellite imagery can help mitigate climate change. Meanwhile, many existing missions operate in manual tasking regimes only, thus missing potential events of interest. To overcome slow downlink rates cost-effectively, onboard detection is a viable solution. However, traditional methane enhancement methods are too computationally demanding for resource-limited onboard hardware. This work accelerates methane detection by focusing on efficient, low-power algorithms. We test fast target detection methods (ACE, CEM) that have not been previously used for methane detection and propose a Mag1c-SAS - a significantly faster variant of the current state-of-the-art algorithm for methane detection: Mag1c. To explore their true detection potential, we integrate them with a machine learning model (U-Net, LinkNet). Our results identify two promising candidates (Mag1c-SAS and CEM), both acceptably accurate for the detection of strong plumes and computationally efficient enough for onboard deployment: one optimized more for accuracy, the other more for speed, achieving up to ~100x and ~230x faster computation than original Mag1c on resource-limited hardware. Additionally, we propose and evaluate three band selection strategies. One of them can outperform the method traditionally used in the field while using fewer channels, leading to even faster processing without compromising accuracy. This research lays the foundation for future advancements in onboard methane detection with minimal hardware requirements, improving timely data delivery. The produced code, data, and models are open-sourced and can be accessed from https://github.com/zaitra/methane-filters-benchmark.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 2, 2025

Knowledge Graph in Astronomical Research with Large Language Models: Quantifying Driving Forces in Interdisciplinary Scientific Discovery

Identifying and predicting the factors that contribute to the success of interdisciplinary research is crucial for advancing scientific discovery. However, there is a lack of methods to quantify the integration of new ideas and technological advancements in astronomical research and how these new technologies drive further scientific breakthroughs. Large language models, with their ability to extract key concepts from vast literature beyond keyword searches, provide a new tool to quantify such processes. In this study, we extracted concepts in astronomical research from 297,807 publications between 1993 and 2024 using large language models, resulting in a set of 24,939 concepts. These concepts were then used to form a knowledge graph, where the link strength between any two concepts was determined by their relevance through the citation-reference relationships. By calculating this relevance across different time periods, we quantified the impact of numerical simulations and machine learning on astronomical research. The knowledge graph demonstrates two phases of development: a phase where the technology was integrated and another where the technology was explored in scientific discovery. The knowledge graph reveals that despite machine learning has made much inroad in astronomy, there is currently a lack of new concept development at the intersection of AI and Astronomy, which may be the current bottleneck preventing machine learning from further transforming the field of astronomy.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 3, 2024

The ALPINE-CRISTAL-JWST Survey: The Fast Metal Enrichment of Massive Galaxies at z~5

We present the stellar mass-metallicity relation (MZR) and mass-metallicity-star formation relation ("fundamental metallicity relation"; FMR) of 18 massive (log(M/M_odot) = 9.5-11) main-sequence galaxies at z~5 from the ALPINE-CRISTAL-JWST sample. This sample complements recent studies by JWST at up to two orders of magnitude lower stellar masses. The metallicities are derived using strong optical lines, and verified by temperature-based oxygen abundance measurements for five galaxies for which faint auroral lines are detected. We find little evolution at the massive end of the MZR between z~5 and cosmic noon at z~2, suggesting a fast metal enrichment at early times. The FMR at z=5 exhibits a 5x larger scatter (preferentially to lower metallicities) compared the local FMR relation. This scatter can be explained by a bursty star formation and the direct build-up of metals in early galaxies as well as differences in age and outflow efficiencies. Capitalizing on all available samples, we find that the observed MZR and FMR over three orders of stellar mass is generally in good agreement with results from cosmological simulation, although some underestimate the metal enrichment at low stellar masses. This may be due to too efficient metal-rich outflows. We show that the ALPINE-CRISTAL-JWST galaxies likely joined the current FMR at z~10 and will evolve into massive (log(M/M_odot)~11.4) galaxies with super-solar metallicities by z=0.

  • 56 authors
·
Oct 17, 2025

Peakbagging the K2 KEYSTONE sample with PBjam: characterising the individual mode frequencies in solar-like oscillators

The pattern of individual mode frequencies in solar-like oscillators provides valuable insight into their properties and interior structures. The identification and characterisation of these modes requires high signal-to-noise and frequency resolution. The KEYSTONE project unlocks the asteroseismic potential of the K2 mission by providing individually reduced, high-quality time series data, global asteroseismic parameters, and spectroscopic analysis for 173 solar-like oscillators. In this work, we build on the KEYSTONE project and present the first analysis of the pattern of individual modes in the oscillation spectra for the K2 KEYSTONE stars. We perform a robust identification and characterisation of the modes through peakbagging methods in the open-source analysis tool PBjam. We present over 6000 mode frequencies, widths, and heights for 168 stars in the sample, covering the HR diagram from FGK dwarfs to sub-giants and the lower red giant branch, providing a significant increase in the number of individual mode frequency detections for main sequence and sub-giant oscillators. This study also presents sample-wide trends of oscillation patterns as a function of the fundamental stellar properties, and improves the precision of the global asteroseismic parameters. These measurements are part of the legacy of the K2 mission, and can be used to perform detailed modelling to improve the precision of fundamental properties of these stars. The results of this analysis provides evidence for the validity of using PBjam to identify and characterise the modes resulting from the observations of the future PLATO mission.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 24, 2025

AstroM^3: A self-supervised multimodal model for astronomy

While machine-learned models are now routinely employed to facilitate astronomical inquiry, model inputs tend to be limited to a primary data source (namely images or time series) and, in the more advanced approaches, some metadata. Yet with the growing use of wide-field, multiplexed observational resources, individual sources of interest often have a broad range of observational modes available. Here we construct an astronomical multimodal dataset and propose AstroM^3, a self-supervised pre-training approach that enables a model to learn from multiple modalities simultaneously. Specifically, we extend the CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) model to a trimodal setting, allowing the integration of time-series photometry data, spectra, and astrophysical metadata. In a fine-tuning supervised setting, our results demonstrate that CLIP pre-training improves classification performance for time-series photometry, where accuracy increases from 84.6% to 91.5%. Furthermore, CLIP boosts classification accuracy by up to 12.6% when the availability of labeled data is limited, showing the effectiveness of leveraging larger corpora of unlabeled data. In addition to fine-tuned classification, we can use the trained model in other downstream tasks that are not explicitly contemplated during the construction of the self-supervised model. In particular we show the efficacy of using the learned embeddings for misclassifications identification, similarity search, and anomaly detection. One surprising highlight is the "rediscovery" of Mira subtypes and two Rotational variable subclasses using manifold learning and dimension reduction algorithm. To our knowledge this is the first construction of an n>2 mode model in astronomy. Extensions to n>3 modes is naturally anticipated with this approach.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 13, 2024

Machine Learning Force Fields with Data Cost Aware Training

Machine learning force fields (MLFF) have been proposed to accelerate molecular dynamics (MD) simulation, which finds widespread applications in chemistry and biomedical research. Even for the most data-efficient MLFFs, reaching chemical accuracy can require hundreds of frames of force and energy labels generated by expensive quantum mechanical algorithms, which may scale as O(n^3) to O(n^7), with n proportional to the number of basis functions. To address this issue, we propose a multi-stage computational framework -- ASTEROID, which lowers the data cost of MLFFs by leveraging a combination of cheap inaccurate data and expensive accurate data. The motivation behind ASTEROID is that inaccurate data, though incurring large bias, can help capture the sophisticated structures of the underlying force field. Therefore, we first train a MLFF model on a large amount of inaccurate training data, employing a bias-aware loss function to prevent the model from overfitting tahe potential bias of this data. We then fine-tune the obtained model using a small amount of accurate training data, which preserves the knowledge learned from the inaccurate training data while significantly improving the model's accuracy. Moreover, we propose a variant of ASTEROID based on score matching for the setting where the inaccurate training data are unlabeled. Extensive experiments on MD datasets and downstream tasks validate the efficacy of ASTEROID. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/abukharin3/asteroid.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 5, 2023

STAR: A First-Ever Dataset and A Large-Scale Benchmark for Scene Graph Generation in Large-Size Satellite Imagery

Scene graph generation (SGG) in satellite imagery (SAI) benefits promoting understanding of geospatial scenarios from perception to cognition. In SAI, objects exhibit great variations in scales and aspect ratios, and there exist rich relationships between objects (even between spatially disjoint objects), which makes it attractive to holistically conduct SGG in large-size very-high-resolution (VHR) SAI. However, there lack such SGG datasets. Due to the complexity of large-size SAI, mining triplets <subject, relationship, object> heavily relies on long-range contextual reasoning. Consequently, SGG models designed for small-size natural imagery are not directly applicable to large-size SAI. This paper constructs a large-scale dataset for SGG in large-size VHR SAI with image sizes ranging from 512 x 768 to 27,860 x 31,096 pixels, named STAR (Scene graph generaTion in lArge-size satellite imageRy), encompassing over 210K objects and over 400K triplets. To realize SGG in large-size SAI, we propose a context-aware cascade cognition (CAC) framework to understand SAI regarding object detection (OBD), pair pruning and relationship prediction for SGG. We also release a SAI-oriented SGG toolkit with about 30 OBD and 10 SGG methods which need further adaptation by our devised modules on our challenging STAR dataset. The dataset and toolkit are available at: https://linlin-dev.github.io/project/STAR.

  • 14 authors
·
Jun 13, 2024

AceMap: Knowledge Discovery through Academic Graph

The exponential growth of scientific literature requires effective management and extraction of valuable insights. While existing scientific search engines excel at delivering search results based on relational databases, they often neglect the analysis of collaborations between scientific entities and the evolution of ideas, as well as the in-depth analysis of content within scientific publications. The representation of heterogeneous graphs and the effective measurement, analysis, and mining of such graphs pose significant challenges. To address these challenges, we present AceMap, an academic system designed for knowledge discovery through academic graph. We present advanced database construction techniques to build the comprehensive AceMap database with large-scale academic entities that contain rich visual, textual, and numerical information. AceMap also employs innovative visualization, quantification, and analysis methods to explore associations and logical relationships among academic entities. AceMap introduces large-scale academic network visualization techniques centered on nebular graphs, providing a comprehensive view of academic networks from multiple perspectives. In addition, AceMap proposes a unified metric based on structural entropy to quantitatively measure the knowledge content of different academic entities. Moreover, AceMap provides advanced analysis capabilities, including tracing the evolution of academic ideas through citation relationships and concept co-occurrence, and generating concise summaries informed by this evolutionary process. In addition, AceMap uses machine reading methods to generate potential new ideas at the intersection of different fields. Exploring the integration of large language models and knowledge graphs is a promising direction for future research in idea evolution. Please visit https://www.acemap.info for further exploration.

  • 26 authors
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Mar 4, 2024

1FLAT: a Firmamento-based catalog of AGN in Fermi-LAT high Galactic latitude γ-ray sources

We present a systematic reassessment of 5,062 high-Galactic latitude gamma-ray sources from the Fermi-LAT 4FGL-DR4 catalog using Firmamento, a web-based platform for multi-frequency source discovery and analysis. Our goal is to provide an independent evaluation of LAT gamma-ray source associations through alternative spectral and spatial methods that combine recent and legacy survey data, supplemented by human supervision of spectral energy distributions (SEDs), source morphology, flux variability, and template-based comparisons. Firmamento confirms the 4FGL-DR4 and 4LAC-DR3 counterparts or unassociated sources in 4,493 cases (88.8%), demonstrating the robustness of both approaches. Beyond this general agreement, we identify 421 new blazar counterparts among previously unassociated sources, thereby reducing the fraction of unidentified extragalactic Fermi-LAT sources from 25% to 17%. In addition, in 64 cases we find alternative blazar associations, while in 49 instances we do not confirm the 4FGL-DR4 association. For all confirmed blazar counterparts we provide homogeneous estimates of synchrotron peak frequency and peak flux using machine-learning and template-based methods; these agree with 4LAC-DR3 values in most cases, though significant discrepancies appear for a few dozen sources, often due to improved X-ray coverage. The primary outcome of this work is the 1st Firmamento LAT AGN table (1FLAT), made publicly available through the Firmamento platform (https://firmamento.nyuad.nyu.edu), where all related multi-wavelength data and images are available. The project involved extensive manual validation and benefited from the active participation of graduate and undergraduate students, highlighting the platform's value for both research and education.

  • 18 authors
·
Oct 8, 2025

Presenting an extensive lab- and field-image dataset of crops and weeds for computer vision tasks in agriculture

We present two large datasets of labelled plant-images that are suited towards the training of machine learning and computer vision models. The first dataset encompasses as the day of writing over 1.2 million images of indoor-grown crops and weeds common to the Canadian Prairies and many US states. The second dataset consists of over 540,000 images of plants imaged in farmland. All indoor plant images are labelled by species and we provide rich etadata on the level of individual images. This comprehensive database allows to filter the datasets under user-defined specifications such as for example the crop-type or the age of the plant. Furthermore, the indoor dataset contains images of plants taken from a wide variety of angles, including profile shots, top-down shots, and angled perspectives. The images taken from plants in fields are all from a top-down perspective and contain usually multiple plants per image. For these images metadata is also available. In this paper we describe both datasets' characteristics with respect to plant variety, plant age, and number of images. We further introduce an open-access sample of the indoor-dataset that contains 1,000 images of each species covered in our dataset. These, in total 14,000 images, had been selected, such that they form a representative sample with respect to plant age and ndividual plants per species. This sample serves as a quick entry point for new users to the dataset, allowing them to explore the data on a small scale and find the parameters of data most useful for their application without having to deal with hundreds of thousands of individual images.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 12, 2021

GAIA: A Global, Multi-modal, Multi-scale Vision-Language Dataset for Remote Sensing Image Analysis

The continuous operation of Earth-orbiting satellites generates vast and ever-growing archives of Remote Sensing (RS) images. Natural language presents an intuitive interface for accessing, querying, and interpreting the data from such archives. However, existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are predominantly trained on web-scraped, noisy image-text data, exhibiting limited exposure to the specialized domain of RS. This deficiency results in poor performance on RS-specific tasks, as commonly used datasets often lack detailed, scientifically accurate textual descriptions and instead emphasize solely on attributes like date and location. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce GAIA, a novel dataset designed for multi-scale, multi-sensor, and multi-modal RS image analysis. GAIA comprises of 205,150 meticulously curated RS image-text pairs, representing a diverse range of RS modalities associated to different spatial resolutions. Unlike existing vision-language datasets in RS, GAIA specifically focuses on capturing a diverse range of RS applications, providing unique information about environmental changes, natural disasters, and various other dynamic phenomena. The dataset provides a spatially and temporally balanced distribution, spanning across the globe, covering the last 25 years with a balanced temporal distribution of observations. GAIA's construction involved a two-stage process: (1) targeted web-scraping of images and accompanying text from reputable RS-related sources, and (2) generation of five high-quality, scientifically grounded synthetic captions for each image using carefully crafted prompts that leverage the advanced vision-language capabilities of GPT-4o. Our extensive experiments, including fine-tuning of CLIP and BLIP2 models, demonstrate that GAIA significantly improves performance on RS image classification, cross-modal retrieval and image captioning tasks.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 13, 2025

reBEN: Refined BigEarthNet Dataset for Remote Sensing Image Analysis

This paper presents refined BigEarthNet (reBEN) that is a large-scale, multi-modal remote sensing dataset constructed to support deep learning (DL) studies for remote sensing image analysis. The reBEN dataset consists of 549,488 pairs of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 image patches. To construct reBEN, we initially consider the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 tiles used to construct the BigEarthNet dataset and then divide them into patches of size 1200 m x 1200 m. We apply atmospheric correction to the Sentinel-2 patches using the latest version of the sen2cor tool, resulting in higher-quality patches compared to those present in BigEarthNet. Each patch is then associated with a pixel-level reference map and scene-level multi-labels. This makes reBEN suitable for pixel- and scene-based learning tasks. The labels are derived from the most recent CORINE Land Cover (CLC) map of 2018 by utilizing the 19-class nomenclature as in BigEarthNet. The use of the most recent CLC map results in overcoming the label noise present in BigEarthNet. Furthermore, we introduce a new geographical-based split assignment algorithm that significantly reduces the spatial correlation among the train, validation, and test sets with respect to those present in BigEarthNet. This increases the reliability of the evaluation of DL models. To minimize the DL model training time, we introduce software tools that convert the reBEN dataset into a DL-optimized data format. In our experiments, we show the potential of reBEN for multi-modal multi-label image classification problems by considering several state-of-the-art DL models. The pre-trained model weights, associated code, and complete dataset are available at https://bigearth.net.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 4, 2024

AURORA:Automated Training Framework of Universal Process Reward Models via Ensemble Prompting and Reverse Verification

The reasoning capabilities of advanced large language models (LLMs) like o1 have revolutionized artificial intelligence applications. Nevertheless, evaluating and optimizing complex reasoning processes remain significant challenges due to diverse policy distributions and the inherent limitations of human effort and accuracy. In this paper, we present AURORA, a novel automated framework for training universal process reward models (PRMs) using ensemble prompting and reverse verification. The framework employs a two-phase approach: First, it uses diverse prompting strategies and ensemble methods to perform automated annotation and evaluation of processes, ensuring robust assessments for reward learning. Second, it leverages practical reference answers for reverse verification, enhancing the model's ability to validate outputs and improving training accuracy. To assess the framework's performance, we extend beyond the existing ProcessBench benchmark by introducing UniversalBench, which evaluates reward predictions across full trajectories under diverse policy distribtion with long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) outputs. Experimental results demonstrate that AURORA enhances process evaluation accuracy, improves PRMs' accuracy for diverse policy distributions and long-CoT responses. The project will be open-sourced at https://auroraprm.github.io/. The Universal-PRM-7B is available at https://huggingface.co/infly/Universal-PRM-7B.

  • 11 authors
·
Feb 17, 2025

Estimation of Classical Cepheid's Physical Parameters from NIR Light Curves

Recent space-borne and ground-based observations provide photometric measurements as time series. The effect of interstellar dust extinction in the near-infrared range is only 10% of that measured in the V band. However, the sensitivity of the light curve shape to the physical parameters in the near-infrared is much lower. So, interpreting these types of data sets requires new approaches like the different large-scale surveys, which create similar problems with big data. Using a selected data set, we provide a method for applying routines implemented in R to extract most information of measurements to determine physical parameters, which can also be used in automatic classification schemes and pipeline processing. We made a multivariate classification of 131 Cepheid light curves (LC) in J, H, and K colors, where all the LCs were represented in 20D parameter space in these colors separately. Performing a Principal Component Analysis (PCA), we got an orthogonal coordinate system and squared Euclidean distances between LCs, with 6 significant eigenvalues, reducing the 20-dimension to 6. We also estimated the optimal number of partitions of similar objects and found it to be equal to 7 in each color; their dependence on the period, absolute magnitude, amplitude, and metallicity are also discussed. We computed the Spearman rank correlations, showing that periods and absolute magnitudes correlate with the first three PCs significantly. The first two PC are also found to have a relationship with the amplitude, but the metallicity effects are only marginal. The method shown can be generalized and implemented in unsupervised classification schemes and analysis of mixed and biased samples. The analysis of our Classical Cepheid near-infrared LC sample showed that the J, H, K curves are insufficient for determination of stellar metallicity, with mass being the key factor shaping them.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 9, 2024

Protosolar D-to-H abundance and one part-per-billion PH_{3} in the coldest brown dwarf

The coldest Y spectral type brown dwarfs are similar in mass and temperature to cool and warm (sim200 -- 400 K) giant exoplanets. We can therefore use their atmospheres as proxies for planetary atmospheres, testing our understanding of physics and chemistry for these complex, cool worlds. At these cold temperatures, their atmospheres are cold enough for water clouds to form, and chemical timescales increase, increasing the likelihood of disequilibrium chemistry compared to warmer classes of planets. JWST observations are revolutionizing the characterization of these worlds with high signal-to-noise, moderate resolution near- and mid-infrared spectra. The spectra have been used to measure the abundances of prominent species like water, methane, and ammonia; species that trace chemical reactions like carbon monoxide; and even isotopologues of carbon monoxide and ammonia. Here, we present atmospheric retrieval results using both published fixed-slit (GTO program 1230) and new averaged time series observations (GO program 2327) of the coldest known Y dwarf, WISE 0855-0714 (using NIRSpec G395M spectra), which has an effective temperature of sim 264 K. We present a detection of deuterium in an atmosphere outside of the solar system via a relative measurement of deuterated methane (CH_{3}D) and standard methane. From this, we infer the D/H ratio of a substellar object outside the solar system for the first time. We also present a well-constrained part-per-billion abundance of phosphine (PH_{3}). We discuss our interpretation of these results and the implications for brown dwarf and giant exoplanet formation and evolution.

  • 27 authors
·
Nov 21, 2024

ExoMiner++ on TESS with Transfer Learning from Kepler: Transit Classification and Vetting Catalog for 2-min Data

We present ExoMiner++, an enhanced deep learning model that builds on the success of ExoMiner to improve transit signal classification in 2-minute TESS data. ExoMiner++ incorporates additional diagnostic inputs, including periodogram, flux trend, difference image, unfolded flux, and spacecraft attitude control data, all of which are crucial for effectively distinguishing transit signals from more challenging sources of false positives. To further enhance performance, we leverage transfer learning from high-quality labeled data from the Kepler space telescope, mitigating the impact of TESS's noisier and more ambiguous labels. ExoMiner++ achieves high accuracy across various classification and ranking metrics, significantly narrowing the search space for follow-up investigations to confirm new planets. To serve the exoplanet community, we introduce new TESS catalogs containing ExoMiner++ classifications and confidence scores for each transit signal. Among the 147,568 unlabeled TCEs, ExoMiner++ identifies 7,330 as planet candidates, with the remainder classified as false positives. These 7,330 planet candidates correspond to 1,868 existing TESS Objects of Interest (TOIs), 69 Community TESS Objects of Interest (CTOIs), and 50 newly introduced CTOIs. 1,797 out of the 2,506 TOIs previously labeled as planet candidates in ExoFOP are classified as planet candidates by ExoMiner++. This reduction in plausible candidates combined with the excellent ranking quality of ExoMiner++ allows the follow-up efforts to be focused on the most likely candidates, increasing the overall planet yield.

  • 29 authors
·
Feb 13, 2025

High-energy neutrino emission from tidal disruption event outflow-cloud interactions

Tidal disruption events (TDEs), characterized by their luminous transients and high-velocity outflows, have emerged as plausible sources of high-energy neutrinos contributing to the diffuse neutrino. In this study, we calculate the contribution of TDEs to the diffuse neutrino by employing the outflow-cloud model within the TDE framework. Our analysis indicates that the contribution of TDEs becomes negligible when the redshift Z exceeds 2. Employing a set of fiducial values, which includes outflow energy E_{rm kin}=10^{51} erg, a proton spectrum cutoff energy E_{rm p,max}=100 PeV, a volume TDE rate N=8 times 10^{-7} rm Mpc^{-3} year^{-1}, covering fraction of clouds C_V=0.1, energy conversion efficiency in the shock eta =0.1, and a proton spectrum index Gamma=-1.7, we find that TDEs can account for approximately 80\% of the contribution at energies around 0.3 PeV. Additionally, TDEs still contribute around 18\% to the IceCube data below 0.1 PeV and the total contribution is sim 24^{+2}_{-15}%. In addition, we also discuss the potential influence of various parameter values on the results in detail. With the IceCube data, we impose constraints on the combination of the physical parameters, i.e., C_{f}=NE_{rm kin}C_{rm v}eta. Future observations or theoretical considerations would fix some physical parameters, which will help to constrain some individual parameters of TDEs.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 16, 2024

An Ensemble of Bayesian Neural Networks for Exoplanetary Atmospheric Retrieval

Machine learning is now used in many areas of astrophysics, from detecting exoplanets in Kepler transit signals to removing telescope systematics. Recent work demonstrated the potential of using machine learning algorithms for atmospheric retrieval by implementing a random forest to perform retrievals in seconds that are consistent with the traditional, computationally-expensive nested-sampling retrieval method. We expand upon their approach by presenting a new machine learning model, plan-net, based on an ensemble of Bayesian neural networks that yields more accurate inferences than the random forest for the same data set of synthetic transmission spectra. We demonstrate that an ensemble provides greater accuracy and more robust uncertainties than a single model. In addition to being the first to use Bayesian neural networks for atmospheric retrieval, we also introduce a new loss function for Bayesian neural networks that learns correlations between the model outputs. Importantly, we show that designing machine learning models to explicitly incorporate domain-specific knowledge both improves performance and provides additional insight by inferring the covariance of the retrieved atmospheric parameters. We apply plan-net to the Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3 transmission spectrum for WASP-12b and retrieve an isothermal temperature and water abundance consistent with the literature. We highlight that our method is flexible and can be expanded to higher-resolution spectra and a larger number of atmospheric parameters.

  • 10 authors
·
May 25, 2019

WHOI-Plankton- A Large Scale Fine Grained Visual Recognition Benchmark Dataset for Plankton Classification

Planktonic organisms are of fundamental importance to marine ecosystems: they form the basis of the food web, provide the link between the atmosphere and the deep ocean, and influence global-scale biogeochemical cycles. Scientists are increasingly using imaging-based technologies to study these creatures in their natural habit. Images from such systems provide an unique opportunity to model and understand plankton ecosystems, but the collected datasets can be enormous. The Imaging FlowCytobot (IFCB) at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, for example, is an in situ system that has been continuously imaging plankton since 2006. To date, it has generated more than 700 million samples. Manual classification of such a vast image collection is impractical due to the size of the data set. In addition, the annotation task is challenging due to the large space of relevant classes, intra-class variability, and inter-class similarity. Methods for automated classification exist, but the accuracy is often below that of human experts. Here we introduce WHOI-Plankton: a large scale, fine-grained visual recognition dataset for plankton classification, which comprises over 3.4 million expert-labeled images across 70 classes. The labeled image set is complied from over 8 years of near continuous data collection with the IFCB at the Martha's Vineyard Coastal Observatory (MVCO). We discuss relevant metrics for evaluation of classification performance and provide results for a traditional method based on hand-engineered features and two methods based on convolutional neural networks.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 2, 2015

Solar System Elemental Abundances from the Solar Photosphere and CI-Chondrites

Solar photospheric abundances and CI-chondrite compositions are reviewed and updated to obtain representative solar system abundances of the elements and their isotopes. The new photospheric abundances obtained here lead to higher solar metallicity. Full 3D NLTE photospheric analyses are only available for 11 elements. A quality index for analyses is introduced. For several elements, uncertainties remain large. Protosolar mass fractions are H (X = 0.7060), He (Y = 0.2753), and for metals Li to U (Z = 0.0187). The protosolar (C+N)/H agrees within 13% with the ratio for the solar core from the Borexino experiment. Elemental abundances in CI-chondrites were screened by analytical methods, sample sizes, and evaluated using concentration frequency distributions. Aqueously mobile elements (e.g., alkalis, alkaline earths, etc.) often deviate from normal distributions indicating mobilization and/or sequestration into carbonates, phosphates, and sulfates. Revised CI-chondrite abundances of non-volatile elements are similar to earlier estimates. The moderately volatile elements F and Sb are higher than before, as are C, Br and I, whereas the CI-abundances of Hg and N are now significantly lower. The solar system nuclide distribution curves of s-process elements agree within 4% with s-process predictions of Galactic chemical evolution models. P-process nuclide distributions are assessed. No obvious correlation of CI-chondritic to solar elemental abundance ratios with condensation temperatures is observed, nor is there one for ratios of CI-chondrites/solar wind abundances.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 14, 2025

Chaos as an interpretable benchmark for forecasting and data-driven modelling

The striking fractal geometry of strange attractors underscores the generative nature of chaos: like probability distributions, chaotic systems can be repeatedly measured to produce arbitrarily-detailed information about the underlying attractor. Chaotic systems thus pose a unique challenge to modern statistical learning techniques, while retaining quantifiable mathematical properties that make them controllable and interpretable as benchmarks. Here, we present a growing database currently comprising 131 known chaotic dynamical systems spanning fields such as astrophysics, climatology, and biochemistry. Each system is paired with precomputed multivariate and univariate time series. Our dataset has comparable scale to existing static time series databases; however, our systems can be re-integrated to produce additional datasets of arbitrary length and granularity. Our dataset is annotated with known mathematical properties of each system, and we perform feature analysis to broadly categorize the diverse dynamics present across the collection. Chaotic systems inherently challenge forecasting models, and across extensive benchmarks we correlate forecasting performance with the degree of chaos present. We also exploit the unique generative properties of our dataset in several proof-of-concept experiments: surrogate transfer learning to improve time series classification, importance sampling to accelerate model training, and benchmarking symbolic regression algorithms.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 11, 2021

Robust Binding Energy Distribution Sampling on Amorphous Solid Water Models. Method testing and validation with NH3, CO and CH4

This work aims to develop a method based on a structurally reliable ice model and a statistically and physico-chemically robust approach for BE distribution inference, with the aim to be applicable to various relevant interstellar species. A multiscale computational approach is presented, with a Molecular Dynamics (MD) Heat & Quench protocol for the amorphous water ice model, and an ONIOM(B3LYP-D3(BJ)/6-311+G**:GFN2-xtb) scheme for the BE inference, with a prime emphasis onto the BE/real system size convergence. The sampling of the binding configurations is twofold, exploring both regularly spaced binding sites, as well as various adsorbate-to-substrate orientations on each locally distinct site. This second source of BE diversity accounts for the local roughness of the potential energy landscape of the substrate. Three different adsorbate test cases are considered, i.e. NH3, CO and CH4, owing to their significance in dust icy mantles, and their distinct binding behavior with water ices. The BE distributions for NH3, CO and CH4 have been inferred, with converged statistics. The distribution for NH3 is better represented by a double Gaussian component profile. Three starting adsorbate orientations per site are required to reach convergence for both Gaussian components of NH3, while 2 orientations are sufficient for CO, and one unique for CH4 (symmetric). Further geometrical and molecular surrounding insights have been provided. These results encompass previously reported results.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 25, 2025

The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE)

The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE), one of the programs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III), has now completed its systematic, homogeneous spectroscopic survey sampling all major populations of the Milky Way. After a three year observing campaign on the Sloan 2.5-m Telescope, APOGEE has collected a half million high resolution (R~22,500), high S/N (>100), infrared (1.51-1.70 microns) spectra for 146,000 stars, with time series information via repeat visits to most of these stars. This paper describes the motivations for the survey and its overall design---hardware, field placement, target selection, operations---and gives an overview of these aspects as well as the data reduction, analysis and products. An index is also given to the complement of technical papers that describe various critical survey components in detail. Finally, we discuss the achieved survey performance and illustrate the variety of potential uses of the data products by way of a number of science demonstrations, which span from time series analysis of stellar spectral variations and radial velocity variations from stellar companions, to spatial maps of kinematics, metallicity and abundance patterns across the Galaxy and as a function of age, to new views of the interstellar medium, the chemistry of star clusters, and the discovery of rare stellar species. As part of SDSS-III Data Release 12, all of the APOGEE data products are now publicly available.

  • 78 authors
·
Sep 17, 2015

XRISM Observations of Cassiopeia A: Overview, Atomic Data, and Spectral Models

Cassiopeia A (Cas A) is the youngest known core-collapse supernova remnant (SNR) in the Galaxy and is perhaps the best-studied SNR in X-rays. Cas A has a line-rich spectrum dominated by thermal emission and given its high flux, it is an appealing target for high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy. Cas A was observed at two different locations during the Performance Verification phase of the XRISM mission, one location in the southeastern part (SE) of the remnant and one in the northwestern part (NW). This paper serves as an overview of these observations and discusses some of the issues relevant for the analysis of the data. We present maps of the so-called ``spatial-spectral mixing'' effect due to the fact that the XRISM point-spread function is larger than a pixel in the Resolve calorimeter array. We analyze spectra from two bright, on-axis regions such that the effects of spatial-spectral mixing are minimized. We find that it is critical to include redshifts/blueshifts and broadening of the emission lines in the two thermal components to achieve a reasonable fit given the high spectral resolution of the Resolve calorimeter. We fit the spectra with two versions of the AtomDB atomic database (3.0.9 and 3.1.0) and two versions of the SPEX (3.08.00 and 3.08.01*) spectral fitting software. Overall we find good agreement between AtomDB 3.1.0 and SPEX 3.08.01* for the spectral models considered in this paper. The most significant difference we found between AtomDB 3.0.9 and 3.1.0 and between AtomDB 3.1.0 and SPEX 3.08.01* is the Ni abundance, with the new atomic data favoring a considerably lower (up to a factor of 3) Ni abundance. Both regions exhibit significantly enhanced abundances compared to Solar values indicating that supernova ejecta dominate the emission in these regions. We find that the abundance ratios of Ti/Fe, Mn/Fe, \& Ni/Fe are significantly lower in the NW than the SE.

  • 17 authors
·
Aug 1, 2025

The Solar Neighborhood LV: Spectral Characterization of an Equatorial Sample of 580 K Dwarfs

We present a spectroscopic characterization of 580 K dwarfs within 33 pc, observed with the CHIRON echelle spectrograph (R=80,000) on the SMARTS 1.5m telescope. This volume-limited sample is part of the RKSTAR survey of sim4400 K dwarf primaries within 50 pc. Using Empirical SpecMatch and the diagnostic lines H-alpha (6562.8 Angstrom) and Li I (6707.8 Angstrom), we derive stellar properties, activity status, and age indicators calibrated against 35 benchmark K dwarfs with ages from 20 Myr to 5 Gyr. We find that 7.4% (43 stars) exhibit signatures of youth and/or chromospheric activity: 19 stars show lithium absorption indicating ages <1 Gyr, and 36 display Hα emission. Kinematic analysis using BANYAN Σ identifies 8 additional young stars through membership in the AB Doradus moving group and the Hyades cluster, bringing the total young/active population to 8.8% (51 stars). Stellar parameters span 3600--5500 K in \teff, -0.60 to +0.55 dex in [Fe/H], and <10 to >25 km s^{-1} in vsin i. A metal-poor population ([Fe/H] leq -0.50 dex) comprises 4\% of the sample. Galactic kinematics place 80% in the thin disk and 18.4% in the thick disk, with one halo member (HD 134439). Young and active stars are predominantly thin disk members, with two thick disk exceptions. Cross-matching with NASA's Exoplanet Archive reveals only 7.5% (44 stars) host confirmed planets as of July 2025. Our results identify 529 mature, inactive K dwarfs as prime targets for terrestrial planet searches, providing a crucial resource for exoplanet habitability studies in the solar neighborhood.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 1

HyperspectralViTs: General Hyperspectral Models for On-board Remote Sensing

On-board processing of hyperspectral data with machine learning models would enable unprecedented amount of autonomy for a wide range of tasks, for example methane detection or mineral identification. This can enable early warning system and could allow new capabilities such as automated scheduling across constellations of satellites. Classical methods suffer from high false positive rates and previous deep learning models exhibit prohibitive computational requirements. We propose fast and accurate machine learning architectures which support end-to-end training with data of high spectral dimension without relying on hand-crafted products or spectral band compression preprocessing. We evaluate our models on two tasks related to hyperspectral data processing. With our proposed general architectures, we improve the F1 score of the previous methane detection state-of-the-art models by 27% on a newly created synthetic dataset and by 13% on the previously released large benchmark dataset. We also demonstrate that training models on the synthetic dataset improves performance of models finetuned on the dataset of real events by 6.9% in F1 score in contrast with training from scratch. On a newly created dataset for mineral identification, our models provide 3.5% improvement in the F1 score in contrast to the default versions of the models. With our proposed models we improve the inference speed by 85% in contrast to previous classical and deep learning approaches by removing the dependency on classically computed features. With our architecture, one capture from the EMIT sensor can be processed within 30 seconds on realistic proxy of the ION-SCV 004 satellite.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 22, 2024

ModelTables: A Corpus of Tables about Models

We present ModelTables, a benchmark of tables in Model Lakes that captures the structured semantics of performance and configuration tables often overlooked by text only retrieval. The corpus is built from Hugging Face model cards, GitHub READMEs, and referenced papers, linking each table to its surrounding model and publication context. Compared with open data lake tables, model tables are smaller yet exhibit denser inter table relationships, reflecting tightly coupled model and benchmark evolution. The current release covers over 60K models and 90K tables. To evaluate model and table relatedness, we construct a multi source ground truth using three complementary signals: (1) paper citation links, (2) explicit model card links and inheritance, and (3) shared training datasets. We present one extensive empirical use case for the benchmark which is table search. We compare canonical Data Lake search operators (unionable, joinable, keyword) and Information Retrieval baselines (dense, sparse, hybrid retrieval) on this benchmark. Union based semantic table retrieval attains 54.8 % P@1 overall (54.6 % on citation, 31.3 % on inheritance, 30.6 % on shared dataset signals); table based dense retrieval reaches 66.5 % P@1, and metadata hybrid retrieval achieves 54.1 %. This evaluation indicates clear room for developing better table search methods. By releasing ModelTables and its creation protocol, we provide the first large scale benchmark of structured data describing AI model. Our use case of table discovery in Model Lakes, provides intuition and evidence for developing more accurate semantic retrieval, structured comparison, and principled organization of structured model knowledge. Source code, data, and other artifacts have been made available at https://github.com/RJMillerLab/ModelTables.

Evaluating small vision-language models as AI assistants for radio astronomical source analysis tasks

The advent of next-generation radio telescopes is set to transform radio astronomy by producing massive data volumes that challenge traditional processing methods. Deep learning techniques have shown strong potential in automating radio analysis tasks, yet are often constrained by the limited availability of large annotated datasets. Recent progress in self-supervised learning has led to foundational radio vision models, but adapting them for new tasks typically requires coding expertise, limiting their accessibility to a broader astronomical community. Text-based AI interfaces offer a promising alternative by enabling task-specific queries and example-driven learning. In this context, Large Language Models (LLMs), with their remarkable zero-shot capabilities, are increasingly used in scientific domains. However, deploying large-scale models remains resource-intensive, and there is a growing demand for AI systems that can reason over both visual and textual data in astronomical analysis. This study explores small-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as AI assistants for radio astronomy, combining LLM capabilities with vision transformers. We fine-tuned the LLaVA VLM on a dataset of 59k radio images from multiple surveys, enriched with 38k image-caption pairs from the literature. The fine-tuned models show clear improvements over base models in radio-specific tasks, achieving ~30% F1-score gains in extended source detection, but they underperform pure vision models and exhibit ~20% drop on general multimodal tasks. Inclusion of caption data and LoRA fine-tuning enhances instruction-following and helps recover ~10% accuracy on standard benchmarks. This work lays the foundation for future advancements in radio VLMs, highlighting their potential and limitations, such as the need for better multimodal alignment, higher-quality datasets, and mitigation of catastrophic forgetting.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 31, 2025

AstroMLab 1: Who Wins Astronomy Jeopardy!?

We present a comprehensive evaluation of proprietary and open-weights large language models using the first astronomy-specific benchmarking dataset. This dataset comprises 4,425 multiple-choice questions curated from the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, covering a broad range of astrophysical topics. Our analysis examines model performance across various astronomical subfields and assesses response calibration, crucial for potential deployment in research environments. Claude-3.5-Sonnet outperforms competitors by up to 4.6 percentage points, achieving 85.0% accuracy. For proprietary models, we observed a universal reduction in cost every 3-to-12 months to achieve similar score in this particular astronomy benchmark. Open-source models have rapidly improved, with LLaMA-3-70b (80.6%) and Qwen-2-72b (77.7%) now competing with some of the best proprietary models. We identify performance variations across topics, with non-English-focused models generally struggling more in exoplanet-related fields, stellar astrophysics, and instrumentation related questions. These challenges likely stem from less abundant training data, limited historical context, and rapid recent developments in these areas. This pattern is observed across both open-weights and proprietary models, with regional dependencies evident, highlighting the impact of training data diversity on model performance in specialized scientific domains. Top-performing models demonstrate well-calibrated confidence, with correlations above 0.9 between confidence and correctness, though they tend to be slightly underconfident. The development for fast, low-cost inference of open-weights models presents new opportunities for affordable deployment in astronomy. The rapid progress observed suggests that LLM-driven research in astronomy may become feasible in the near future.

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 15, 2024

Falcon: A Remote Sensing Vision-Language Foundation Model (Technical Report)

This paper introduces a holistic vision-language foundation model tailored for remote sensing, named Falcon. Falcon offers a unified, prompt-based paradigm that effectively executes comprehensive and complex remote sensing tasks. Falcon demonstrates powerful understanding and reasoning abilities at the image, region, and pixel levels. Specifically, given simple natural language instructions and remote sensing images, Falcon can produce impressive results in text form across 14 distinct tasks, i.e., image classification, object detection, segmentation, image captioning, and etc. To facilitate Falcon's training and empower its representation capacity to encode rich spatial and semantic information, we developed Falcon_SFT, a large-scale, multi-task, instruction-tuning dataset in the field of remote sensing. The Falcon_SFT dataset consists of approximately 78 million high-quality data samples, covering 5.6 million multi-spatial resolution and multi-view remote sensing images with diverse instructions. It features hierarchical annotations and undergoes manual sampling verification to ensure high data quality and reliability. Extensive comparative experiments are conducted, which verify that Falcon achieves remarkable performance over 67 datasets and 14 tasks, despite having only 0.7B parameters. We release the complete dataset, code, and model weights at https://github.com/TianHuiLab/Falcon, hoping to help further develop the open-source community.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 14, 2025