Neural posterior estimation with autoregressive tiling for detecting objects in astronomical images

Abstract

Upcoming astronomical surveys will produce petabytes of high-resolution images of the night sky, providing information about billions of stars and galaxies. Detecting and characterizing the astronomical objects in these images is a fundamental task in astronomy—and a challenging one, as most of these objects are faint and many visually overlap with other objects. We propose an amortized variational inference procedure to solve this instance of small-object detection. Our key innovation is a family of spatially autoregressive variational distributions that partition and order the latent space according to a K-color checkerboard pattern. By construction, the conditional independencies of this variational family mirror those of the posterior distribution. We fit the variational distribution, which is parameterized by a convolutional neural network, using neural posterior estimation (NPE) to minimize an expectation of the forward KL divergence. Using images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance. We further demonstrate that the proposed autoregressive structure greatly improves posterior calibration.