Weakly supervised classifiers trained on background-versus-mixture samples can identify anomalous gamma-ray sources without labeled signal templates, approaching supervised performance in controlled benchmarks.
Via Machinae: Searching for Stellar Streams using Unsupervised Machine Learning
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abstract
We develop a new machine learning algorithm, Via Machinae, to identify cold stellar streams in data from the Gaia telescope. Via Machinae is based on ANODE, a general method that uses conditional density estimation and sideband interpolation to detect local overdensities in the data in a model agnostic way. By applying ANODE to the positions, proper motions, and photometry of stars observed by Gaia, Via Machinae obtains a collection of those stars deemed most likely to belong to a stellar stream. We further apply an automated line-finding method based on the Hough transform to search for line-like features in patches of the sky. In this paper, we describe the Via Machinae algorithm in detail and demonstrate our approach on the prominent stream GD-1. Though some parts of the algorithm are tuned to increase sensitivity to cold streams, the Via Machinae technique itself does not rely on astrophysical assumptions, such as the potential of the Milky Way or stellar isochrones. This flexibility suggests that it may have further applications in identifying other anomalous structures within the Gaia dataset, for example debris flow and globular clusters.
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astro-ph.HE 1years
2026 1verdicts
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Weakly supervised machine learning for model-agnostic searches of new phenomena in the $\gamma$-ray sky
Weakly supervised classifiers trained on background-versus-mixture samples can identify anomalous gamma-ray sources without labeled signal templates, approaching supervised performance in controlled benchmarks.