Domain adaptation for robust inference of gravitational lens parameters accross datasets

Upcoming surveys are predicted to discover galaxy-scale strong lenses on the order of 10^5, making deep learning methods necessary in lensing data analysis. Currently, there is insufficient real lensing data to train deep learning algorithms, but the alternative of training only on simulated data results in poor performance on real data. Domain Adaptation may be able to bridge the gap between simulated and real datasets.

We utilize domain adaptation for the estimation of Einstein radius (Θ) in simulated galaxy-scale gravitational lensing images with different levels of observational realism. We evaluate two domain adaptation techniques – Domain Adversarial Neural Networks (DANN) and Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD). We train on a source domain of simulated lenses and apply it to a target domain of lenses simulated to emulate noise conditions in the Dark Energy Survey (DES). We show that both domain adaptation techniques can significantly improve the model performance on the more complex target domain dataset. This work is the first application of domain adaptation for a regression task in strong lensing imaging analysis. Our results show the potential of using domain adaptation to perform analysis of future survey data with a deep neural network trained on simulated data.