Increasing the Precision of Surrogate Models for Weak Lensing Mass Maps with Flow Matching
Weak gravitational lensing maps compactly encode the evolution of cosmic large-scale structure and are a key tool for cosmological analyses. Performing inference directly at the map level allows flexible choices of statistics and can increase constraining power. Conventional methods rely solely on N-body simulations and are computationally expensive. Generative machine-learning emulators can accelerate map-level theory prediction. However, existing GAN-based map-level surrogates still have limited statistical fidelity. They can produce over-smoothed maps, may fail to capture the full distribution of generated map sets and can be difficult to train. Continuous normalizing flows trained with flow matching have recently emerged as a powerful class of generative models. We present a residual label-conditional flow matching generative network that conditions explicitly on the matter density Omega_m and clustering amplitude sigma_8 for a fixed source redshift distribution n(z). The model learns a continuous probability flow in a residual space from label-specific noise distributions to convergence maps. We evaluate it using pixel and peak statistics, the power spectrum, bispectrum, power-spectrum correlation matrices, and other validation metrics. Compared with the previous GAN benchmark, the proposed method improves the typical fidelity of generated maps from below 10% and below 20% to below 1% and below 5% for basic and higher-order statistics, respectively. The agreement at the level of map distributions is also very good: maps generated from random noise match well the distribution of maps generated with N-body simulations from random initial conditions. This work brings us closer to a practical mass-map emulator that captures the cosmological signal while supporting multiple forms of data analysis.