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This content will become publicly available on July 18, 2026

Title: A Poisson Process AutoDecoder for X-Ray Sources
Abstract X-ray observing facilities, such as the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the eROSITA, have detected over a million astronomical sources associated with high-energy phenomena. The arrival of photons as a function of time follows a Poisson process and can vary by orders-of-magnitude, presenting obstacles for common tasks such as source classification, physical property derivation, and anomaly detection. Previous work has either failed to directly capture the Poisson nature of the data or only focuses on Poisson rate function reconstruction. In this work, we present the Poisson Process AutoDecoder (PPAD), which is a neural field decoder that maps fixed-length latent features to continuous Poisson rate functions across energy band and time via unsupervised learning. PPAD reconstructs the rate function and yields a representation at the same time. We demonstrate the efficacy of PPAD via reconstruction, regression, classification, and anomaly detection experiments using the Chandra Source Catalog.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2019786 2433718
PAR ID:
10648142
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
AAS
Date Published:
Journal Name:
The Astrophysical Journal
Volume:
988
Issue:
1
ISSN:
0004-637X
Page Range / eLocation ID:
143
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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