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Radiometer Calibration using Machine Learning

Leeney, S. A. K., Bevins, H. T. J., Acedo, E. de Lera, Handley, W. J., Kirkham, C., Patel, R. S., Zhu, J., Molnar, D., Cumner, J., Anstey, D., Artuc, K., Bernardi, G., Bucher, M., Carey, S., Cavillot, J., Chiello, R., Croukamp, W., de Villiers, D. I. L., Ely, J. A., Fialkov, A., Gessey-Jones, T., Kulkarni, G., Magro, A., Meerburg, P. D., Mittal, S., Pattison, J. H. N., Pegwal, S., Pieterse, C. M., Pritchard, J. R., Puchwein, E., Razavi-Ghods, N., Roque, I. L. V., Saxena, A., Scheutwinkel, K. H., Scott, P., Shen, E., Sims, P. H., Spinelli, M.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Radiometers are crucial instruments in radio astronomy, forming the primary component of nearly all radio telescopes. They measure the intensity of electromagnetic radiation, converting this radiation into electrical signals. A radiometer's primary components are an antenna and a Low Noise Amplifier (LNA), which is the core of the ``receiver'' chain. Instrumental effects introduced by the receiver are typically corrected or removed during calibration. However, impedance mismatches between the antenna and receiver can introduce unwanted signal reflections and distortions. Traditional calibration methods, such as Dicke switching, alternate the receiver input between the antenna and a well-characterised reference source to mitigate errors by comparison. Recent advances in Machine Learning (ML) offer promising alternatives. Neural networks, which are trained using known signal sources, provide a powerful means to model and calibrate complex systems where traditional analytical approaches struggle. These methods are especially relevant for detecting the faint sky-averaged 21-cm signal from atomic hydrogen at high redshifts. This is one of the main challenges in observational Cosmology today. Here, for the first time, we introduce and test a machine learning-based calibration framework capable of achieving the precision required for radiometric experiments aiming to detect the 21-cm line.


Improving Bayesian inference in PTA data analysis: importance nested sampling with Normalizing Flows

Villa, Eleonora, Shaifullah, Golam Mohiuddin, Possenti, Andrea, Carbone, Carmelita

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present a detailed study of Bayesian inference workflows for pulsar timing array data with a focus on enhancing efficiency, robustness and speed through the use of normalizing flow-based nested sampling. Building on the Enterprise framework, we integrate the i-nessai sampler and benchmark its performance on realistic, simulated datasets. We analyze its computational scaling and stability, and show that it achieves accurate posteriors and reliable evidence estimates with substantially reduced runtime, by up to three orders of magnitude depending on the dataset configuration, with respect to conventional single-core parallel-tempering MCMC analyses. These results highlight the potential of flow-based nested sampling to accelerate PTA analyses while preserving the quality of the inference.


Addressing prior dependence in hierarchical Bayesian modeling for PTA data analysis II: Noise and SGWB inference through parameter decorrelation

Villa, Eleonora, D'Amico, Luigi, Barca, Aldo, Bittordo, Fatima Modica, Alì, Francesco, Meneghetti, Massimo, Naso, Luca

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Pulsar Timing Arrays provide a powerful framework to measure low-frequency gravitational waves, but accuracy and robustness of the results are challenged by complex noise processes that must be accurately modeled. Standard PTA analyses assign fixed uniform noise priors to each pulsar, an approach that can introduce systematic biases when combining the array. To overcome this limitation, we adopt a hierarchical Bayesian modeling strategy in which noise priors are parametrized by higher-level hyperparameters. We further address the challenge posed by the correlations between hyperparameters and physical noise parameters, focusing on those describing red noise and dispersion measure variations. To decorrelate these quantities, we introduce an orthogonal reparametrization of the hierarchical model implemented with Normalizing Flows. We also employ i-nessai, a flow-guided nested sampler, to efficiently explore the resulting higher-dimensional parameter space. We apply our method to a minimal 3-pulsar case study, performing a simultaneous inference of noise and SGWB parameters. Despite the limited dataset, the results consistently show that the hierarchical treatment constrains the noise parameters more tightly and partially alleviates the red-noise-SGWB degeneracy, while the orthogonal reparametrization further enhances parameter independence without affecting the correlations intrinsic to the power-law modeling of the physical processes involved.


Towards Strong Certified Defense with Universal Asymmetric Randomization

Hong, Hanbin, Kundu, Ashish, Payani, Ali, Wang, Binghui, Hong, Yuan

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Randomized smoothing has become essential for achieving certified adversarial robustness in machine learning models. However, current methods primarily use isotropic noise distributions that are uniform across all data dimensions, such as image pixels, limiting the effectiveness of robustness certification by ignoring the heterogeneity of inputs and data dimensions. To address this limitation, we propose UCAN: a novel technique that \underline{U}niversally \underline{C}ertifies adversarial robustness with \underline{A}nisotropic \underline{N}oise. UCAN is designed to enhance any existing randomized smoothing method, transforming it from symmetric (isotropic) to asymmetric (anisotropic) noise distributions, thereby offering a more tailored defense against adversarial attacks. Our theoretical framework is versatile, supporting a wide array of noise distributions for certified robustness in different $\ell_p$-norms and applicable to any arbitrary classifier by guaranteeing the classifier's prediction over perturbed inputs with provable robustness bounds through tailored noise injection. Additionally, we develop a novel framework equipped with three exemplary noise parameter generators (NPGs) to optimally fine-tune the anisotropic noise parameters for different data dimensions, allowing for pursuing different levels of robustness enhancements in practice.Empirical evaluations underscore the significant leap in UCAN's performance over existing state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating up to $182.6\%$ improvement in certified accuracy at large certified radii on MNIST, CIFAR10, and ImageNet datasets.\footnote{Code is anonymously available at \href{https://github.com/youbin2014/UCAN/}{https://github.com/youbin2014/UCAN/}}


Provable Mixed-Noise Learning with Flow-Matching

Hagemann, Paul, Gruhlke, Robert, Stankewitz, Bernhard, Schillings, Claudia, Steidl, Gabriele

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We study Bayesian inverse problems with mixed noise, modeled as a combination of additive and multiplicative Gaussian components. While traditional inference methods often assume fixed or known noise characteristics, real-world applications, particularly in physics and chemistry, frequently involve noise with unknown and heterogeneous structure. Motivated by recent advances in flow-based generative modeling, we propose a novel inference framework based on conditional flow matching embedded within an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm to jointly estimate posterior samplers and noise parameters. To enable high-dimensional inference and improve scalability, we use simulation-free ODE-based flow matching as the generative model in the E-step of the EM algorithm. We prove that, under suitable assumptions, the EM updates converge to the true noise parameters in the population limit of infinite observations. Our numerical results illustrate the effectiveness of combining EM inference with flow matching for mixed-noise Bayesian inverse problems.




How noise affects memory in linear recurrent networks

Guan, JingChuan, Kubota, Tomoyuki, Kuniyoshi, Yasuo, Nakajima, Kohei

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The effects of noise on memory in a linear recurrent network are theoretically investigated. Memory is characterized by its ability to store previous inputs in its instantaneous state of network, which receives a correlated or uncorrelated noise. Two major properties are revealed: First, the memory reduced by noise is uniquely determined by the noise's power spectral density (PSD). Second, the memory will not decrease regardless of noise intensity if the PSD is in a certain class of distribution (including power law). The results are verified using the human brain signals, showing good agreement.