{"paper":{"title":"Contrastive learning of extragalactic stellar streams. Sculpting a latent space of representations with DES DR2 photometry","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"astro-ph.GA","authors_text":"Amina Helmi, Ernesto Benitez-Walz, Jelle Mes, Juan Mir\\'o-Carretero, Koen Kuijken","submitted_at":"2026-01-30T14:22:55Z","abstract_excerpt":"We present a self-supervised approach for characterizing low surface brightness tidal features in wide-field imaging data by applying the nearest-neighbor contrastive learning of visual representations (NNCLR) algorithm to a curated subset of the Dark Energy Survey Data Release 2 (DES DR2). We construct 38,334 cutouts of well-resolved galaxies in the g, r, i bands, applying a novel \"tiered sigmoid scaling function\" to dynamically adjust image contrast according to the object's signal-to-noise and background level. A supplemental labeled sample of 366 galaxies enables qualitative assessment of "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2601.23013","kind":"arxiv","version":2},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2601.23013/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}