The Sound of Noise: Leveraging the Inductive Bias of Pre-trained Audio Transformers for Glitch Identification in LIGO

Abstract

Transient noise artifacts, or glitches, fundamentally limit the sensitivity of gravitational-wave (GW) interferometers and can mimic true astrophysical signals, particularly the short-duration intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) mergers. Current glitch classification methods, such as Gravity Spy, rely on supervised models trained from scratch using labeled datasets. These approaches suffer from a significant ``label bottleneck," requiring massive, expertly annotated datasets to achieve high accuracy and often struggling to generalize to new glitch morphologies or exotic GW signals encountered in observing runs. In this work, we present a novel cross-domain framework that treats GW strain data through the lens of audio processing. We utilize the Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST), a model pre-trained on large-scale audio datasets, and adapt it to the GW domain. Instead of learning time-frequency features from scratch, our method exploits the strong inductive bias inherent in pre-trained audio models, transferring learned representations of natural sound to the characterization of detector noise and GW signals, including IMBHs. We validate this approach by analyzing strain data from the third (O3) and fourth (O4) observing runs of the LIGO detectors. We used t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE), an unsupervised clustering technique, to visualize the AST-derived embeddings of signals and glitches, revealing well-separated groups that align closely with independently validated Gravity Spy glitch classes. Our results indicate that the inductive bias from audio pre-training allows superior feature extraction compared to traditional supervised techniques, offering a robust, data-efficient pathway for discovering new, anomalous transients, and classifying complex noise artifacts in the era of next-generation detectors.