arXiv:2608.02300cs.CV2026-08

用通用视觉模型教天文模型认星系形态,少人工标注也能提效果。

A General-Purpose VLM Can Teach an Astronomy Foundation Model to Better Recognize Galaxy Morphology

论文配图:A General-Purpose VLM Can Teach an Astronomy Foundation Model to Better Recognize Galaxy Morphology
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用通用视觉模型做弱监督,指导天文模型识别星系形状。
  • 在两个巡天数据集上,小样本标注下分类准确率显著提升。
  • 适合需高效处理大规模巡天数据的研究者使用。

现有天文基础模型虽具备良好的星系表征能力,但在适应新巡天条件和特定形态识别任务时仍需大量人工标注。本文发现,基于视觉语言模型(VLM)的问答系统蕴含有意义的视觉-语义先验,可作为下游形态分类器的弱监督信号,在有限人工标注预算下提升分类性能。我们构建了一个面向巡天的VQA基准,涵盖两种典型成像模式,评估了当前主流VLM在星系形态问题上的表现。结果表明,这些模型能捕捉到有效的形态信号与信息性置信度,但尚不足以替代人类标注。受此启发,我们以通用VLM为教师,指导基于大规模Galaxy Zoo标注预训练的Zoobot模型。在两个巡天领域及多种标注预算下,该教学策略均持续提升Zoobot的形态分类性能。这证明通用VLM提供的知识与天文基础模型互补,可在有限标注条件下有效提升星系形态识别能力。该方法适用于未来大规模巡天(如薇拉·鲁宾天文台的LSST和南希·格雷斯·罗曼空间望远镜)的高效适应。基准与代码已公开于https://github.com/fw-ic/VLM-morphology-teacher。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Existing astronomy foundation models provide strong galaxy representations, but adapting them to new survey conditions and survey-specific morphology recognition tasks still requires substantial human supervision. We show that VLM-based VQA systems contain meaningful visual-semantic priors that can serve as weak supervision for downstream morphology classifiers and improve morphology classification under limited human-label budgets. We first introduce a survey-oriented VQA benchmark spanning two representative imaging regimes and evaluate state-of-the-art VLMs on galaxy morphology questions. The results show that these models capture useful morphology signals and informative uncertainty, but are not sufficiently reliable to replace human annotators. Motivated by this finding, we use a general-purpose VLM as a morphology teacher for Zoobot, an astronomy foundation model pretrained on large-scale Galaxy Zoo annotations. Across two survey domains and multiple annotation budgets, the VLM teacher consistently improves Zoobot's downstream morphology classification. These results demonstrate that a general-purpose VLM provides knowledge complementary to an astronomy foundation model and can teach it to better recognize galaxy morphology under limited human supervision. The resulting pipeline is designed for label-efficient adaptation to forthcoming large-scale surveys, including the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The benchmark and code are publicly available at https://github.com/fw-ic/VLM-morphology-teacher.

星系形态弱监督VLM天文模型

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