The Platonic Universe: Do Foundation Models See the Same Sky?
Abstract
We test the Platonic Representation Hypothesis (PRH) in astronomy by measuring representational convergence across a range of foundation models trained on different data types. Using spectroscopic and imaging observations from JWST, HSC, Legacy Survey, and DESI, we compare representations from vision transformers, self-supervised models, and astronomy-specific architectures via mutual -nearest neighbour analysis. We observe consistent scaling: representational alignment generally increases with model capacity across our tested architectures, supporting convergence toward a shared representation of galaxy astrophysics. Our results suggest that astronomical foundation models can use pre-trained general-purpose architectures, allowing us to capitalise on the broader machine learning community's already-spent computational investment.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.19453,
title = {The Platonic Universe: Do Foundation Models See the Same Sky?},
author = {UniverseTBD and : and Kshitij Duraphe and Michael J. Smith and Shashwat Sourav and John F. Wu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.19453},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
9 pages, 3 tables, 1 figure. Accepted as a workshop paper to Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences at NeurIPS 2025