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arXiv · 2509.24134

ASTROCO: Self-Supervised Conformer-Style Transformers for Light-Curve Embeddings

Antony Tan·Pavlos Protopapas·Martina Cádiz-Leyton·Guillermo Cabrera-Vives·Cristobal Donoso-Oliva·Ignacio Becker
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Abstract

We present AstroCo, a Conformer-style encoder for irregular stellar light curves. By combining attention with depthwise convolutions and gating, AstroCo captures both global dependencies and local features. On MACHO R-band, AstroCo outperforms Astromer v1 and v2, yielding 70 percent and 61 percent lower error respectively and a relative macro-F1 gain of about 7 percent, while producing embeddings that transfer effectively to few-shot classification. These results highlight AstroCo's potential as a strong and label-efficient foundation for time-domain astronomy.

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Antony Tan, Pavlos Protopapas, Martina Cádiz-Leyton, Guillermo Cabrera-Vives, Cristobal Donoso-Oliva, Ignacio Becker. 2025-09-29. ASTROCO: Self-Supervised Conformer-Style Transformers for Light-Curve Embeddings. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24134

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