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Abstract - Probabilistic Data-Driven Modelling of Astrophysical Transients: The Neural Process Family for Ultrafast and Class-Agnostic Light Curve Reconstruction with NightLANP
Astrophysical observations taken from Earth are subject to weather, environmental, and scientific constraints that lead to sparse, irregular light curves. On the eve of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time, its massive dataset offers unprecedented opportunities for transient science. Yet, a key challenge remains its cadence, which will be sparse and irregular across six bands, limiting scientific inference. Interpolating light curves helps mitigate this, with Gaussian Processes being the standard, but they struggle with cross-band correlations, require an a priori kernel specification, and must be fit to each light curve individually and hence scale poorly. Here, we introduce the neural process family for light curve reconstruction, combining the probabilistic framework of Gaussian Processes with the scalability of deep learning. By meta-learning on diverse simulated transients, Attentive Neural Processes shift the bulk of the computational cost to training, enabling rapid, amortized inference with a single, class-agnostic model. Evaluated on realistic Rubin cadences across 15 transient classes, Attentive Neural Processes consistently outperform all benchmarks - a suite of Gaussian Processes and neural networks on every tested metric, spanning regression quality, astrophysical feature recovery, and probabilistic calibration. Our model interpolates all bands simultaneously in microseconds, over four orders of magnitude faster than the next-best neural benchmark and five faster than Gaussian Processes, making them suitable for the nightly LSST alert stream. Attentive Neural Processes avoid the overconfidence of standard neural networks and the underconfidence of Gaussian Processes, delivering sharp, well-calibrated uncertainties. This work establishes the neural process family as a scalable, probabilistic foundation for real-time transient science in the Rubin era.
天体瞬变现象的概率数据驱动建模:用于超快且类别无关的光变曲线重建的神经过程家族NightLANP /
Probabilistic Data-Driven Modelling of Astrophysical Transients: The Neural Process Family for Ultrafast and Class-Agnostic Light Curve Reconstruction with NightLANP
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本文提出利用注意力神经过程(一种融合高斯过程与深度学习优势的模型)来高效重建稀疏、不规则的天体光变曲线,该方法能同时处理多个波段、无需预设内核函数,且速度比传统高斯过程快数万倍,为鲁宾天文台大规模巡天数据中的实时瞬变科学提供了可扩展的解决方案。