Minghui Jia, Qichao Zhang, Ali Luo, Linjing Li, Shuo Ye, Hailing Lu, Wen Hou, Dongbin Zhao. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Stellar flare events are critical observational samples for astronomical research; however, recorded flare events remain limited. Stellar flare forecasting can provide additional flare event samples to support research efforts. Despite this potential, no specialized models for stellar flare forecasting have been proposed to date. In this paper, we present extensive experimental evidence demonstrating that both stellar physical properties and historical flare records are valuable inputs for flare forecasting tasks. We then introduce FLARE (Forecasting Light-curve-based Astronomical Records via features Ensemble), the first-of-its-kind large model specifically designed for stellar flare forecasting. FLARE integrates stellar physical properties and historical flare records through a novel Soft Prompt Module and Residual Record Fusion Module. Experiments on the Kepler light curve dataset demonstrate that FLARE achieves superior performance compared to other methods across all evaluation metrics. Finally, we validate the forecast capability of our model through a comprehensive case study.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), a large-scale astronomical survey project, has released a vast volume of photometric images. These images play a pivotal role in deriving fundamental parameters of celestial objects and investigating the structure of the universe. Nevertheless, in dense star fields, the characteristics of celestial sources are intricate, rendering traditional methods incapable of conducting precise analyses. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a new algorithm named DSDNet for detecting celestial sources in dense star fields and counting them. During the feature extraction phase, DSDNet generates larger feature maps, thereby preserving more information about small targets. By incorporating a convolutional attention module, the model's capacity to learn the features of celestial sources in dense star fields is augmented. Furthermore, to more effectively manage the blending phenomenon among sources, DSDNet integrates CNN and Transformer architectures, enhancing the model's ability to comprehend global features. Experimental findings show that DSDNet exhibits excellent performance, attaining an F1-score of 97.23%. This makes it a valuable resource for aiding SDSS in processing dense star field images.

In astronomical spectral analysis, class recognition is essential and fundamental for subsequent scientific research. The experts often perform the visual inspection after automatic classification to deal with low-quality spectra to improve accuracy. However, given the enormous spectral volume and inadequacy of the current inspection practice, such inspection is tedious and time-consuming. This article presents a visual analytics system named SpectrumVA to promote the efficiency of visual inspection while guaranteeing accuracy. We abstract inspection as a visual parameter space analysis process, using redshifts and spectral lines as parameters. Different navigation strategies are employed in the "selection-inspection-promotion" workflow. At the selection stage, we help the experts identify a spectrum of interest through spectral representations and auxiliary information. Several possible redshifts and corresponding important spectral lines are also recommended through a global-to-local strategy to provide an appropriate entry point for the inspection. The inspection stage adopts a variety of instant visual feedback to help the experts adjust the redshift and select spectral lines in an informed trial-and-error manner. Similar spectra to the inspected one rather than different ones are visualized at the promotion stage, making the inspection process more fluent. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SpectrumVA through a quantitative algorithmic assessment, a case study, interviews with domain experts, and a user study.

Deep learning scheme has received significant attention during these years, particularly as a way of building hierarchical representations from unlabeled data for a variety of signal and information processing tasks. However, deep neural networks suffer from slow learning speed since most used training algorithms are based on variations of the gradient descent algorithms which require iterative optimization and thus are time-consuming. In addition, a series of control parameters need to be specified empirically which lacks of the theoretical guidance, and current learning algorithms for deep networks are not very suitable to incremental learning scenario. To address these issues, we propose a fast learning scheme in this paper. The basic idea of our approach is to pre-train basic units such as auto-encoders of the deep architecture in an analytical way without any iterative optimization procedure. This scheme is also extended to an incremental learning version. The experimental result shows the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art gradient descent based algorithms. To demonstrate the impact of our algorithm on complicated real world applications, we give an example of its performance in astronomical spectra pattern recognition.

The success of deep learning proves that deep models are able to achieve much better performance than shallow models in representation learning. However, deep neural networks with auto-encoder stacked structure suffer from low learning efficiency since common used training algorithms are variations of iterative algorithms based on the time-consuming gradient descent, especially when the network structure is complicated. To deal with this complicated network structure problem, we employ a “divide and conquer” strategy to design a locally connected network structure to decrease the network complexity. The basic idea of our approach is to force the basic units of the deep architecture, e.g., auto-encoders, to extract local features in an analytical way without iterative optimization and assemble these local features into a unified feature. We apply this method to process astronomical spectral data to illustrate the superiority of our approach over other baseline algorithms. Furthermore, we investigate visual interpretations of high level features and the model to demonstrate what exactly the model learn from the data.

Affinity Propagation (AP) algorithm is a useful clustering technique with a lot of noteworthy advantages. It has been successfully applied in many applications. However, this algorithm does not scale for large scale data sets because it requires quadratic computational time and memory usage in the problem size. In this paper, we concentrate on the needs of big data analytics and propose an effective and efficient scheme to decrease the computational complexity and memory usage of AP algorithm. The basic idea of our approach is embedding data points in distance-preserving binary codes and then decomposing the original big data set into a series of small subsets by aggregating similar data points according to their binary codes. The experimental results and the real world astronomical spectral data application demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach quantitatively and visually.

Deconvolution is known as an ill-posed problem. In order to solve such a problem, a regularization method is needed to constrain the solution space and find a plausible and stable solution. In practice, it is very computation intensive when using cross-validation method to select the regularization parameter. In this paper, we present an adaptive regularization method to find the optimal regularization parameter value and represent the trade-off between model fitness of the data and the smoothness of the extracted signal. Spectral signal extraction experimental results demonstrate that the time complexity the proposed method is much lower than the one without adaptive regularization and is convenient for users also. And quantitative performance analysis show that the proposed intelligent approach performs better than that of current deconvolution extraction method and other extraction method used in the Large Area Multi-Objects Fiber Spectroscopy Telescope spectral signal processing pipeline.