The Platonic Universe: Do Foundation Models See the Same Sky?
UniverseTBD, null, :, null, Duraphe, Kshitij, Smith, Michael J., Sourav, Shashwat, Wu, John F.
–arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence
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 $k$-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.
arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence
Sep-25-2025
- Country:
- Asia > Japan (0.04)
- Europe > United Kingdom
- England > Hertfordshire (0.04)
- North America > Canada
- Genre:
- Research Report > New Finding (1.00)
- Technology: