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Accelerating Bayesian Sampling for Massive Black Hole Binaries with Prior Constraints from Conditional Variational Autoencoder

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2025-06-03 v2

Abstract

A Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) model is employed for parameter inference on gravitational waves (GW) signals of massive black hole binaries, considering joint observations with a network of three space-based GW detectors. Our experiments show that the trained CVAE model can estimate the posterior distribution of source parameters in approximately one second, while the standard Bayesian sampling method, utilizing parallel computation across 16 CPU cores, takes an average of 20 hours for a GW signal instance. However, the sampling distributions from CVAE exhibit lighter tails, appearing broader when compared to the standard Bayesian sampling results. By using CVAE results to constrain the prior range for Bayesian sampling, the sampling time is reduced by a factor of \sim6 while maintaining the similar precision of the Bayesian results.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.09266,
  title  = {Accelerating Bayesian Sampling for Massive Black Hole Binaries with Prior Constraints from Conditional Variational Autoencoder},
  author = {Hui Sun and He Wang and Jibo He},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.09266},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

9 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:43:02.470Z