用扩散模型生成真实星系图像,提升罕见天体检测能力
Can AI Dream of Unseen Galaxies? Conditional Diffusion Model for Galaxy Morphology Augmentation
- 基于星系形态条件生成高保真星系图像,支持数据增强
- 使罕见星系检测数量翻倍,分类准确率提升最高30%
- 适合天文数据稀缺场景下的机器学习研究者使用
观测天文学依赖视觉特征识别关键天体现象。尽管机器学习日益自动化这一过程,但大规模巡天中模型泛化能力受限于标注数据的代表性不足,尤其对稀有但重要的天体。为此,我们提出一种条件扩散模型(GalaxySD),用于合成真实星系图像以扩充训练数据。该模型基于星系动物园2(GZ2)数据集,包含志愿者标注的视觉特征与星系图像对,可生成符合指定形态条件的多样化、高保真图像。该模型实现生成外推,将已标注数据拓展至未见领域,显著提升罕见天体检测能力。将合成图像融入机器学习流程后,标准形态分类任务的完整性和纯净度提升最高达30%。以早期星系中具有明显尘带特征(占GZ2数据集约0.1%)为例,检测实例数从352例增至872例,较此前基于人工目视的研究提升一倍。本研究展示了生成模型在弥合稀缺标注数据与广阔观测参数空间之间的潜力,为未来天体物理基础模型发展提供启示。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Observational astronomy relies on visual feature identification to detect critical astrophysical phenomena. While machine learning (ML) increasingly automates this process, models often struggle with generalization in large-scale surveys due to the limited representativeness of labeled datasets, whether from simulations or human annotation, a challenge pronounced for rare yet scientifically valuable objects. To address this, we propose a conditional diffusion model to synthesize realistic galaxy images for augmenting ML training data (hereafter GalaxySD). Leveraging the Galaxy Zoo 2 dataset which contains visual feature, galaxy image pairs from volunteer annotation, we demonstrate that GalaxySD generates diverse, high-fidelity galaxy images that closely adhere to the specified morphological feature conditions. Moreover, this model enables generative extrapolation to project well-annotated data into unseen domains and advancing rare object detection. Integrating synthesized images into ML pipelines improves performance in standard morphology classification, boosting completeness and purity by up to 30% across key metrics. For rare object detection, using early-type galaxies with prominent dust lane features (~0.1% in GZ2 dataset) as a test case, our approach doubled the number of detected instances, from 352 to 872, compared to previous studies based on visual inspection. This study highlights the power of generative models to bridge gaps between scarce labeled data and the vast, uncharted parameter space of observational astronomy and sheds insight for future astrophysical foundation model developments. Our project homepage is available at https://galaxysd-webpage.streamlit.app/.
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