Alexandre Adam

2025-11-23

ArXiv (prépublication)

Pixellated Posterior Sampling of Point Spread Functions in Astronomical Images

Gabriel Missael Barco

We introduce a novel framework for upsampled Point Spread Function (PSF) modeling using pixel-level Bayesian inference. Accurate PSF charact… (voir plus)erization is critical for precision measurements in many fields including: weak lensing, astrometry, and photometry. Our method defines the posterior distribution of the pixelized PSF model through the combination of an analytic Gaussian likelihood and a highly expressive generative diffusion model prior, trained on a library of HST ePSF templates. Compared to traditional methods (parametric Moffat, ePSF template-based, and regularized likelihood), we demonstrate that our PSF models achieve orders of magnitude higher likelihood and residuals consistent with noise, all while remaining visually realistic. Further, the method applies even for faint and heavily masked point sources, merely producing a broader posterior. By recovering a realistic, pixel-level posterior distribution, our technique enables the first meaningful propagation of detailed PSF morphological uncertainty in downstream analysis. An implementation of our posterior sampling procedure is available on GitHub.

2025-11-23

ArXiv (prépublication)

The spatially-resolved effect of mergers on the stellar mass assembly of MaNGA galaxies

Eirini Angeloudi

Marc Huertas-Company

Jesús Falcón-Barroso

Alina Boecker

2025-10-21

Astronomy & Astrophysics (publié)

The spatially-resolved effect of mergers on the stellar mass assembly of MaNGA galaxies

Eirini Angeloudi

Marc Huertas-Company

Jesús Falcón-Barroso

Alina Boecker

Understanding the origin of stars within a galaxy - whether formed in-situ or accreted from other galaxies (ex-situ) - is key to constrainin… (voir plus)g its evolution. Spatially resolving these components provides crucial insights into a galaxy's mass assembly history. We aim to predict the spatial distribution of ex-situ stellar mass fraction in MaNGA galaxies, and to identify distinct assembly histories based on the radial gradients of these predictions in the central regions. We employ a diffusion model trained on mock MaNGA analogs (MaNGIA), derived from the TNG50 cosmological simulation. The model learns to predict the posterior distribution of resolved ex-situ stellar mass fraction maps, conditioned on stellar mass density, velocity, and velocity dispersion gradient maps. After validating the model on an unseen test set from MaNGIA, we apply it to MaNGA galaxies to infer the spatially-resolved distribution of their ex-situ stellar mass fractions - i.e. the fraction of stellar mass in each spaxel originating from mergers. We identify four broad categories of ex-situ mass distributions: flat gradient, in-situ dominated; flat gradient, ex-situ dominated; positive gradient; and negative gradient. The vast majority of MaNGA galaxies fall in the first category - flat gradients with low ex-situ fractions - confirming that in-situ star formation is the main assembly driver for low- to intermediate-mass galaxies. At high stellar masses, the ex-situ maps are more diverse, highlighting the key role of mergers in building the most massive systems. Ex-situ mass distributions correlate with morphology, star-formation activity, stellar kinematics, and environment, indicating that accretion history is a primary factor shaping massive galaxies. Finally, by tracing their assembly histories in TNG50, we link each class to distinct merger scenarios, ranging from secular evolution to merger-dominated growth.

2025-10-19

Astronomy & Astrophysics (publié)

The spatially-resolved effect of mergers on the stellar mass assembly of MaNGA galaxies

E. Angeloudi

Marc Huertas-Company

Jes'us Falc'on-Barroso

A. Boecker

Understanding the origin of stars within a galaxy - whether formed in-situ or accreted from other galaxies (ex-situ) - is key to constrainin… (voir plus)g its evolution. Spatially resolving these components provides crucial insights into a galaxy's mass assembly history. We aim to predict the spatial distribution of ex-situ stellar mass fraction in MaNGA galaxies, and to identify distinct assembly histories based on the radial gradients of these predictions in the central regions. We employ a diffusion model trained on mock MaNGA analogs (MaNGIA), derived from the TNG50 cosmological simulation. The model learns to predict the posterior distribution of resolved ex-situ stellar mass fraction maps, conditioned on stellar mass density, velocity, and velocity dispersion gradient maps. After validating the model on an unseen test set from MaNGIA, we apply it to MaNGA galaxies to infer the spatially-resolved distribution of their ex-situ stellar mass fractions - i.e. the fraction of stellar mass in each spaxel originating from mergers. We identify four broad categories of ex-situ mass distributions: flat gradient, in-situ dominated; flat gradient, ex-situ dominated; positive gradient; and negative gradient. The vast majority of MaNGA galaxies fall in the first category - flat gradients with low ex-situ fractions - confirming that in-situ star formation is the main assembly driver for low- to intermediate-mass galaxies. At high stellar masses, the ex-situ maps are more diverse, highlighting the key role of mergers in building the most massive systems. Ex-situ mass distributions correlate with morphology, star-formation activity, stellar kinematics, and environment, indicating that accretion history is a primary factor shaping massive galaxies. Finally, by tracing their assembly histories in TNG50, we link each class to distinct merger scenarios, ranging from secular evolution to merger-dominated growth.

2025-09-29

ArXiv (prépublication)

caskade: building Pythonic scientific simulators

Connor Stone

Adam Coogan

2025-09-15

Journal of Open Source Software (publié)

Echoes in the Noise: Posterior Samples of Faint Galaxy Surface Brightness Profiles with Score-Based Likelihoods and Priors

Connor Bottrell

Examining the detailed structure of galaxy populations provides valuable insights into their formation and evolution mechanisms. Significant… (voir plus) barriers to such analysis are the non-trivial noise properties of real astronomical images and the point spread function (PSF) which blurs structure. Here we present a framework which combines recent advances in score-based likelihood characterization and diffusion model priors to perform a Bayesian analysis of image deconvolution. The method, when applied to minimally processed \emph{Hubble Space Telescope} (\emph{HST}) data, recovers structures which have otherwise only become visible in next-generation \emph{James Webb Space Telescope} (\emph{JWST}) imaging.

2025-04-08

The Astronomical Journal (publié)

Solving Bayesian inverse problems with diffusion priors and off-policy RL

Moksh J. Jain

Yoshua Bengio

Glen Berseth

Nikolay Malkin

This paper presents a practical application of Relative Trajectory Balance (RTB), a recently introduced off-policy reinforcement learning (R… (voir plus)L) objective that can asymptotically solve Bayesian inverse problems optimally. We extend the original work by using RTB to train conditional diffusion model posteriors from pretrained unconditional priors for challenging linear and non-linear inverse problems in vision, and science. We use the objective alongside techniques such as off-policy backtracking exploration to improve training. Importantly, our results show that existing training-free diffusion posterior methods struggle to perform effective posterior inference in latent space due to inherent biases.

2025-03-06

ICLR.cc/2025/Workshop/DeLTa (poster)

openreview.net

Tackling the Problem of Distributional Shifts: Correcting Misspecified, High-Dimensional Data-Driven Priors for Inverse Problems

Gabriel Missael Barco

Connor Stone

Bayesian inference for inverse problems hinges critically on the choice of priors. In the absence of specific prior information, population-… (voir plus)level distributions can serve as effective priors for parameters of interest. With the advent of machine learning, the use of data-driven population-level distributions (encoded, e.g., in a trained deep neural network) as priors is emerging as an appealing alternative to simple parametric priors in a variety of inverse problems. However, in many astrophysical applications, it is often difficult or even impossible to acquire independent and identically distributed samples from the underlying data-generating process of interest to train these models. In these cases, corrupted data or a surrogate, e.g. a simulator, is often used to produce training samples, meaning that there is a risk of obtaining misspecified priors. This, in turn, can bias the inferred posteriors in ways that are difficult to quantify, which limits the potential applicability of these models in real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose addressing this issue by iteratively updating the population-level distributions by retraining the model with posterior samples from different sets of observations and showcase the potential of this method on the problem of background image reconstruction in strong gravitational lensing when score-based models are used as data-driven priors. We show that starting from a misspecified prior distribution, the updated distribution becomes progressively closer to the underlying population-level distribution, and the resulting posterior samples exhibit reduced bias after several updates.

2025-02-06

The Astrophysical Journal (publié)

IRIS: A Bayesian Approach for Image Reconstruction in Radio Interferometry with expressive Score-Based priors

No'e Dia

M. J. Yantovski-Barth

Micah Bowles

Anna M. M. Scaife

Inferring sky surface brightness distributions from noisy interferometric data in a principled statistical framework has been a key challeng… (voir plus)e in radio astronomy. In this work, we introduce Imaging for Radio Interferometry with Score-based models (IRIS). We use score-based models trained on optical images of galaxies as an expressive prior in combination with a Gaussian likelihood in the uv-space to infer images of protoplanetary disks from visibility data of the DSHARP survey conducted by ALMA. We demonstrate the advantages of this framework compared with traditional radio interferometry imaging algorithms, showing that it produces plausible posterior samples despite the use of a misspecified galaxy prior. Through coverage testing on simulations, we empirically evaluate the accuracy of this approach to generate calibrated posterior samples.

2025-01-05

ArXiv (prépublication)

IRIS: A Bayesian Approach for Image Reconstruction in Radio Interferometry with expressive Score-Based priors

No'e Dia

M. J. Yantovski-Barth

Micah Bowles

Anna M. M. Scaife

Inferring sky surface brightness distributions from noisy interferometric data in a principled statistical framework has been a key challeng… (voir plus)e in radio astronomy. In this work, we introduce Imaging for Radio Interferometry with Score-based models (IRIS). We use score-based models trained on optical images of galaxies as an expressive prior in combination with a Gaussian likelihood in the uv-space to infer images of protoplanetary disks from visibility data of the DSHARP survey conducted by ALMA. We demonstrate the advantages of this framework compared with traditional radio interferometry imaging algorithms, showing that it produces plausible posterior samples despite the use of a misspecified galaxy prior. Through coverage testing on simulations, we empirically evaluate the accuracy of this approach to generate calibrated posterior samples.

2025-01-05

ArXiv (prépublication)

Amortizing intractable inference in diffusion models for vision, language, and control

Moksh J. Jain

Diffusion models have emerged as effective distribution estimators in vision, language, and reinforcement learning, but their use as priors … (voir plus)in downstream tasks poses an intractable posterior inference problem. This paper studies amortized sampling of the posterior over data,

2024-09-25

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Conference (poster)