Maven: A Multimodal Foundation Model for Supernova Science
<|reference_start|>Maven: A Multimodal Foundation Model for Supernova Science: A common setting in astronomy is the availability of a small number of high-quality observations, and larger amounts of either lower-quality observations or synthetic data from simplified models. Time-domain astrophysics is a canonical example of this imbalance, with the number of supernovae observed photometrically outpacing the number observed spectroscopically by multiple orders of magnitude. At the same time, no data-driven models exist to understand these photometric and spectroscopic observables in a common context. Contrastive learning objectives, which have grown in popularity for aligning distinct data modalities in a shared embedding space, provide a potential solution to extract information from these modalities. We present Maven, the first foundation model for supernova science. To construct Maven, we first pre-train our model to align photometry and spectroscopy from 0.5M synthetic supernovae using a constrastive objective. We then fine-tune the model on 4,702 observed supernovae from the Zwicky Transient Facility. Maven reaches state-of-the-art performance on both classification and redshift estimation, despite the embeddings not being explicitly optimized for these tasks. Through ablation studies, we show that pre-training with synthetic data improves overall performance. In the upcoming era of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, Maven serves as a Rosetta Stone for leveraging large, unlabeled and multimodal time-domain datasets.<|reference_end|>
@article{zhang2024maven:,
    title={Maven: A Multimodal Foundation Model for Supernova Science},
    author={Gemma Zhang, Thomas Helfer, Alexander T. Gagliano, Siddharth
  Mishra-Sharma, V. Ashley Villar},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.16829},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2408.16829},
    primaryClass={astro-ph.HE astro-ph.IM cs.LG}
}