Domain adaptation in application to gravitational lens finding

Abstract: The next decade is expected to see a tenfold increase in the number of strong gravitational lenses, driven by new wide-field imaging surveys. To discover these rare objects, efficient automated detection methods need to be developed. In this work, we assess the performance of three domain adaptation techniques -- Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation (ADDA), Wasserstein Distance Guided Representation Learning (WDGRL), and Supervised Domain Adaptation (SDA) -- in enhancing lens-finding algorithms trained on simulated data when applied to observations from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program. We find that WDGRL combined with an ENN-based encoder provides the best performance in an unsupervised setting and that supervised domain adaptation is able to enhance the model's ability to distinguish between lenses and common similar-looking false positives, such as spiral galaxies, which is crucial for future lens surveys.