arXiv subjects

Alexandre Boucaud

Publications and source records attributed to Alexandre Boucaud.

23 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Neural Posterior Estimation with Differentiable Simulators

Simulation-Based Inference (SBI) is a promising Bayesian inference framework that alleviates the need for analytic likelihoods to estimate posterior distributions. Recent advances using neural density estimators in SBI algorithms have demonstrated the ability to achieve high-fidelity posteriors, at the expense of a large number of simulations ; which makes their application potentially very time-consuming when using complex physical simulations. In this work we focus on boosting the sample-efficiency of posterior density estimation using the gradients of the simulator. We present a new method to perform Neural Posterior Estimation (NPE) with a differentiable simulator. We demonstrate how gradient information helps constrain the shape of the posterior and improves sample-efficiency.

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arXiv2021

Probabilistic segmentation of overlapping galaxies for large cosmological surveys

Encoder-Decoder networks such as U-Nets have been applied successfully in a wide range of computer vision tasks, especially for image segmentation of different flavours across different fields. Nevertheless, most applications lack of a satisfying quantification of the uncertainty of the prediction. Yet, a well calibrated segmentation uncertainty can be a key element for scientific applications such as precision cosmology. In this on-going work, we explore the use of the probabilistic version of the U-Net, recently proposed by Kohl et al (2018), and adapt it to automate the segmentation of galaxies for large photometric surveys. We focus especially on the probabilistic segmentation of overlapping galaxies, also known as blending. We show that, even when training with a single ground truth per input sample, the model manages to properly capture a pixel-wise uncertainty on the segmentation map. Such uncertainty can then be propagated further down the analysis of the galaxy properties. To our knowledge, this is the first time such an experiment is applied for galaxy deblending in astrophysics.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2020

Fink, a new generation of broker for the LSST community

Fink is a broker designed to enable science with large time-domain alert streams such as the one from the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). It exhibits traditional astronomy broker features such as automatised ingestion, annotation, selection and redistribution of promising alerts for transient science. It is also designed to go beyond traditional broker features by providing real-time transient classification which is continuously improved by using state-of-the-art Deep Learning and Adaptive Learning techniques. These evolving added values will enable more accurate scientific output from LSST photometric data for diverse science cases while also leading to a higher incidence of new discoveries which shall accompany the evolution of the survey. In this paper we introduce Fink, its science motivation, architecture and current status including first science verification cases using the Zwicky Transient Facility alert stream.

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arXiv2019

Photometry of high-redshift blended galaxies using deep learning

The new generation of deep photometric surveys requires unprecedentedly precise shape and photometry measurements of billions of galaxies to achieve their main science goals. At such depths, one major limiting factor is the blending of galaxies due to line-of-sight projection, with an expected fraction of blended galaxies of up to 50%. Current deblending approaches are in most cases either too slow or not accurate enough to reach the level of requirements. This work explores the use of deep neural networks to estimate the photometry of blended pairs of galaxies in monochrome space images, similar to the ones that will be delivered by the Euclid space telescope. Using a clean sample of isolated galaxies from the CANDELS survey, we artificially blend them and train two different network models to recover the photometry of the two galaxies. We show that our approach can recover the original photometry of the galaxies before being blended with $\sim$7% accuracy without any human intervention and without any assumption on the galaxy shape. This represents an improvement of at least a factor of 4 compared to the classical SExtractor approach. We also show that forcing the network to simultaneously estimate a binary segmentation map results in a slightly improved photometry. All data products and codes will be made public to ease the comparison with other approaches on a common data set.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2016

Convolution kernels for multi-wavelength imaging

Astrophysical images issued from different instruments and/or spectral bands often require to be processed together, either for fitting or comparison purposes. However each image is affected by an instrumental response, also known as PSF, that depends on the characteristics of the instrument as well as the wavelength and the observing strategy. Given the knowledge of the PSF in each band, a straightforward way of processing images is to homogenise them all to a target PSF using convolution kernels, so that they appear as if they had been acquired by the same instrument. We propose an algorithm that generates such PSF-matching kernels, based on Wiener filtering with a tunable regularisation parameter. This method ensures all anisotropic features in the PSFs to be taken into account. We compare our method to existing procedures using measured Herschel/PACS and SPIRE PSFs and simulated JWST/MIRI PSFs. Significant gains up to two orders of magnitude are obtained with respect to the use of kernels computed assuming Gaussian or circularised PSFs.

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