Portrait of Yashar Hezaveh

Yashar Hezaveh

Associate Academic Member
Assistant Professor, Université de Montréal, Department of Physics

Biography

Yashar Hezaveh is an associate academic member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute and director of the Montréal Institute for Astrophysical Data Analysis and Machine Learning (Ciela). He is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at Université de Montréal and the Canada Research Chair in Astrophysical Data Analysis and Machine Learning. In addition, Hezaveh is an associate member of McGill University’s Trottier Space Institute, and a visiting fellow at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at Flatiron Institute in New York and at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. He was previously a research fellow at the Flatiron Institute (2018–2019) and a NASA Hubble Fellow at Stanford University (2013–2018).

Hezaveh is a world leader in the analysis of astrophysical data using deep learning. His current research focuses primarily on Bayesian inference in AI, the goal being to learn about the distribution of dark matter in strongly lensed galaxies using data from large cosmological surveys. His research is supported by the Schmidt Futures Foundation and the Simons Foundation.

Current Students

PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Research Intern - McGill University
Principal supervisor :
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Master's Research - McGill University
Research Intern - Université de Montréal
Research Intern - Université de Montréal
Master's Research - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Research Intern - Université de Montréal
Research Intern - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
PhD - Université de Montréal
Master's Research - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Master's Research - Université de Montréal
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Master's Research - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
PhD - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Publications

Score-Based Likelihood Characterization for Inverse Problems in the Presence of Non-Gaussian Noise
Ronan Legin
Alexandre Adam
Likelihood analysis is typically limited to normally distributed noise due to the difficulty of determining the probability density function… (see more) of complex, high-dimensional, non-Gaussian, and anisotropic noise. This work presents Score-based LIkelihood Characterization (SLIC), a framework that resolves this issue by building a data-driven noise model using a set of noise realizations from observations. We show that the approach produces unbiased and precise likelihoods even in the presence of highly non-Gaussian correlated and spatially varying noise. We use diffusion generative models to estimate the gradient of the probability density of noise with respect to data elements. In combination with the Jacobian of the physical model of the signal, we use Langevin sampling to produce independent samples from the unbiased likelihood. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method using real data from the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope.
Posterior Sampling of the Initial Conditions of the Universe from Non-linear Large Scale Structures using Score-Based Generative Models
Ronan Legin
Matthew Ho
Pablo Lemos
Shirley Ho
Benjamin Wandelt
Time Delay Cosmography with a Neural Ratio Estimator
Eve Campeau-Poirier
Adam Coogan
We explore the use of a Neural Ratio Estimator (NRE) to determine the Hubble constant (…
AstroPhot: Fitting Everything Everywhere All at Once in Astronomical Images
Connor J Stone
Stéphane Courteau
Jean-Charles Cuillandre
Nikhil Arora
Sampling-Based Accuracy Testing of Posterior Estimators for General Inference
Pixelated Reconstruction of Foreground Density and Background Surface Brightness in Gravitational Lensing Systems Using Recurrent Inference Machines
Alexandre Adam
Max Welling
Modeling strong gravitational lenses in order to quantify distortions in the images of background sources and to reconstruct the mass densit… (see more)y in foreground lenses has been a difficult computational challenge. As the quality of gravitational lens images increases, the task of fully exploiting the information they contain becomes computationally and algorithmically more difficult. In this work, we use a neural network based on the recurrent inference machine to reconstruct simultaneously an undistorted image of the background source and the lens mass density distribution as pixelated maps. The method iteratively reconstructs the model parameters (the image of the source and a pixelated density map) by learning the process of optimizing the likelihood given the data using the physical model (a ray-tracing simulation), regularized by a prior implicitly learned by the neural network through its training data. When compared to more traditional parametric models, the proposed method is significantly more expressive and can reconstruct complex mass distributions, which we demonstrate by using realistic lensing galaxies taken from the IllustrisTNG cosmological hydrodynamic simulation.
Strong gravitational lensing as a probe of dark matter
Simona Vegetti
Simon Birrer
Giulia Despali
C. Fassnacht
Daniel A. Gilman
L.
J. McKean
D. Powell
Conor M. O'riordan
G.
Vernardos
Dark matter structures within strong gravitational lens galaxies and along their line of sight leave a gravitational imprint on the multiple… (see more) images of lensed sources. Strong gravitational lensing provides, therefore, a key test of different dark matter models in a way that is independent of the baryonic content of matter structures on subgalactic scales. In this chapter, we describe how galaxy-scale strong gravitational lensing observations are sensitive to the physical nature of dark matter. We provide a historical perspective of the field, and review its current status. We discuss the challenges and advances in terms of data, treatment of systematic errors and theoretical predictions, that will enable one to deliver a stringent and robust test of different dark matter models in the near future. With the advent of the next generation of sky surveys, the number of known strong gravitational lens systems is expected to increase by several orders of magnitude. Coupled with high-resolution follow-up observations, these data will provide a key opportunity to constrain the properties of dark matter with strong gravitational lensing.
Beyond Gaussian Noise: A Generalized Approach to Likelihood Analysis with Non-Gaussian Noise
Ronan Legin
Alexandre Adam
Spatial variations in aromatic hydrocarbon emission in a dust-rich galaxy
Justin Spilker
Kedar A. Phadke
Manuel Aravena
Melanie Archipley
Matthew Bayliss
Jack E. Birkin
Matthieu Béthermin
James R. Burgoyne
Jared Cathey
Scott Chapman
Håkon Dahle
Anthony H. Gonzalez
Gayathri Gururajan
Christopher C Hayward
Ryley Hill
Taylor A. Hutchison
Keunho J. Kim
Seonwoo Kim
D. Law … (see 19 more)
Ronan Legin
M. Malkan
Daniel P. Marrone
E. Murphy
Desika Narayanan
Alexander Navarre
Grace M. Olivier
J. Rich
Jane R Rigby
Cassie Reuter
J. Rhoads
Keren Sharon
J. Smith
Manuel Solimano
Nikolaus Sulzenauer
Joaquin Vieira
David Vizgan
Axel Weiß
K. Whitaker
Sampling-Based Accuracy Testing of Posterior Estimators for General Inference
Spectroscopy of CASSOWARY gravitationally-lensed galaxies in SDSS: characterisation of an extremely bright reionization-era analog at z = 1.42
Ramesh Mainali
Daniel P Stark
Tucker Jones
Richard S Ellis
Jane R Rigby
We present new observations of sixteen bright (r = 19 − 21) gravitationally lensed galaxies at z ≃ 1 − 3 selected from the CASSOWARY s… (see more)urvey. Included in our sample is the z = 1.42 galaxy CSWA-141, one of the brightest known reionization-era analogs at high redshift (g=20.5), with a large sSFR (31.2 Gyr−1) and an [OIII]+Hβ equivalent width (EW[OIII] + Hβ=730 Å) that is nearly identical to the average value expected at z ≃ 7 − 8. In this paper, we investigate the rest-frame UV nebular line emission in our sample with the goal of understanding the factors that regulate strong CIII] emission. Whereas most of the sources in our sample show weak UV line emission, we find elevated CIII] in the spectrum of CSWA-141 (EWCIII]=4.6±1.9 Å) together with detections of other prominent emission lines (OIII], Si III], Fe II⋆, Mg II). We compare the rest-optical line properties of high redshift galaxies with strong and weak CIII] emission, and find that systems with the strongest UV line emission tend to have young stellar populations and nebular gas that is moderately metal-poor and highly ionized, consistent with trends seen at low and high redshift. The brightness of CSWA-141 enables detailed investigation of the extreme emission line galaxies which become common at z > 6. We find that gas traced by the CIII] doublet likely probes higher densities than that traced by [OII] and [SII]. Characterisation of the spectrally resolved Mg II emission line and several low ionization absorption lines suggests neutral gas around the young stars is likely optically thin, potentially facilitating the escape of ionizing radiation.
A Framework for Obtaining Accurate Posteriors of Strong Gravitational Lensing Parameters with Flexible Priors and Implicit Likelihoods Using Density Estimation
Ronan Legin
Benjamin Wandelt
We report the application of implicit likelihood inference to the prediction of the macroparameters of strong lensing systems with neural ne… (see more)tworks. This allows us to perform deep-learning analysis of lensing systems within a well-defined Bayesian statistical framework to explicitly impose desired priors on lensing variables, obtain accurate posteriors, and guarantee convergence to the optimal posterior in the limit of perfect performance. We train neural networks to perform a regression task to produce point estimates of lensing parameters. We then interpret these estimates as compressed statistics in our inference setup and model their likelihood function using mixture density networks. We compare our results with those of approximate Bayesian neural networks, discuss their significance, and point to future directions. Based on a test set of 100,000 strong lensing simulations, our amortized model produces accurate posteriors for any arbitrary confidence interval, with a maximum percentage deviation of 1.4% at the 21.8% confidence level, without the need for any added calibration procedure. In total, inferring 100,000 different posteriors takes a day on a single GPU, showing that the method scales well to the thousands of lenses expected to be discovered by upcoming sky surveys.