English

LensAgent: A Self Evolving Agent for Autonomous Physical Inference of Sub-galactic Structure

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2026-04-07 v1 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

Probing dark matter distribution on sub-galactic scales is essential for testing the Cold Dark Matter (Λ\LambdaCDM) paradigm. Strong gravitational lensing, as one of the most powerful approach by far, provides a direct, purely gravitational probe of these substructures. However, extracting cosmological constraints is severely bottlenecked by the mass-sheet degeneracy (MSD) and the unscalable nature of manual and neural-network modeling. Here, we introduce LensAgent, a pioneering training-free, large language model (LLM)-driven agentic framework for the autonomous physical inference of mass distributions. Operating as an autonomous scientific agent, LensAgent couples high-level logical reasoning with deterministic physical modeling tools, demonstarting successful reconstruction of mass distribution in SLACS Grade A strong lensing systems. This self-evolving architecture enables the robust extraction of sub-galactic substructures at scale, unlocking the cosmological potential of upcoming wide-field surveys such as the Rubin Observatory (LSST) and Euclid.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.03691,
  title  = {LensAgent: A Self Evolving Agent for Autonomous Physical Inference of Sub-galactic Structure},
  author = {Xiaotang Feng and Zihan Wang and Zilang Shu and Jean-Paul Kneib and Philip Torr},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.03691},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:53:49.984Z