Universal Spectral Tokenization via Self-Supervised Panchromatic Representation Learning
Authors:
Jeff Shen,
Francois Lanusse,
Liam Holden Parker,
Ollie Liu,
Tom Hehir,
Leopoldo Sarra,
Lucas Meyer,
Micah Bowles,
Sebastian Wagner-Carena,
Sebastian Wagner-Carena,
Helen Qu,
Siavash Golkar,
Alberto Bietti,
Hatim Bourfoune,
Nathan Cassereau,
Pierre Cornette,
Keiya Hirashima,
Geraud Krawezik,
Ruben Ohana,
Nicholas Lourie,
Michael McCabe,
Rudy Morel,
Payel Mukhopadhyay,
Mariel Pettee,
Bruno Régaldo-Saint Blancard
, et al. (3 additional authors not shown)
Abstract:
Sequential scientific data span many resolutions and domains, and unifying them into a common representation is a key step toward developing foundation models for the sciences. Astronomical spectra exemplify this challenge: massive surveys have collected millions of spectra across a wide range of wavelengths and resolutions, yet analyses remain fragmented across spectral domains (e.g., optical vs.…
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Sequential scientific data span many resolutions and domains, and unifying them into a common representation is a key step toward developing foundation models for the sciences. Astronomical spectra exemplify this challenge: massive surveys have collected millions of spectra across a wide range of wavelengths and resolutions, yet analyses remain fragmented across spectral domains (e.g., optical vs. infrared) and object types (e.g., stars vs. galaxies), limiting the ability to pool information across datasets. We present a deep learning model that jointly learns from heterogeneous spectra in a self-supervised manner. Our universal spectral tokenizer processes spectra from a variety of object types and resolutions directly on their native wavelength grids, producing intrinsically aligned, homogeneous, and physically meaningful representations that can be efficiently adapted to achieve competitive performance across a range of downstream tasks. For the first time, we demonstrate that a single model can unify spectral data across resolutions and domains, suggesting that our model can serve as a powerful building block for foundation models in astronomy -- and potentially extend to other scientific domains with heterogeneous sequential data, such as climate and healthcare.
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Submitted 10 November, 2025; v1 submitted 20 October, 2025;
originally announced October 2025.