English

TheUse of Conditional Variational Autoencoders in Generating Stellar Spectra

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2025-08-26 v1 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics Computational Physics Space Physics

Abstract

We present a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) that generates stellar spectra covering 4000 \le T_{\mathrm{eff} \le 11,000 K, 2.0logg5.02.0 \le \log g \le 5.0 dex, 1.5[M/H]+1.5-1.5 \le [\mathrm{M}/\mathrm{H}] \le +1.5 dex, vsini300v\sin i \le 300 km/s, ξt\xi_t between 0 and 4 km/s, and for any instrumental resolving powers less than 115,000. The spectra can be calculated in the wavelength range 4450-5400 \AA. Trained on a grid of \textsc{SYNSPEC} spectra, the network synthesizes a spectrum in around two orders of magnitude faster than line-by-line radiative transfer. We validate the CVAE on 10410^4 test spectra unseen during training. Pixel-wise statistics yield a median absolute residual of <1.8×1031.8\times10^{-3} flux units with no wavelength-dependent bias. A residual error map across the parameters plane shows ΔF<2×103\langle|\Delta F|\rangle<2\times10^{-3} everywhere, and marginal diagnostics versus TeffT_{\mathrm{eff}}, logg\log g, vsiniv\sin i, ξt\xi_t, and [Fe/H][Fe/H]\ reveal no relevant trends. These results demonstrate that the CVAE can serve as a drop-in, physics-aware surrogate for radiative transfer codes, enabling real-time forward modeling in stellar parameter inference and offering promising tools for spectra synthesis for large astrophysical data analysis.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.17059,
  title  = {TheUse of Conditional Variational Autoencoders in Generating Stellar Spectra},
  author = {Marwan Gebran and Ian Bentley},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.17059},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

15 pages, accepted for publication

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:02:55.215Z