StellarF: A Physics-Informed LoRA Framework for Stellar Flare Forecasting with Historical & Statistical Data

Abstract

Stellar flare forecasting represents a critical frontier in astrophysics, offering profound insights into stellar activity mechanisms and exoplanetary habitability assessments. Yet the inherent unpredictability of flare activity, rooted in stellar diversity and evolutionary stages, underpins the field's core challenges: (1) sparse, incomplete, noisy lightcurve data from traditional observations; (2) ineffective multi-scale flare evolution capture via single representations; (3) poor physical interpretability in data-driven models lacking physics-informed priors. To address these challenges, we propose StellarF, a physics-informed framework synergizing general Al with astrophysical domain knowledge via three core components: a unified preprocessing pipeline for lightcurve refinement (missing-value imputation, temporal patch partitioning, adaptive sample filtering); a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA)-finetuned large language model (LLM) backbone enhanced by first-order difference augmentation, flare statistical information, and flare historical record modules for multimodal fusion instead of only simple representations; and a novel physics-informed loss embedding a minimum rising rate prior, appended to the cross-entropy loss, to align with flare physics. Extensive experiments on Kepler and TESS datasets show StellarF achieves state-of-the-art performance across key metrics, setting new benchmarks for flare forecasting. This work bridges general AI with astrophysics, offering a practical, physically interpretable paradigm for transient event forecasting in time-domain astronomy.