Pre-training vision models for the classification of alerts from wide-field time-domain surveys

ArXi:2512.11957v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Modern wide-field time-domain surveys facilitate the study of transient, variable and moving phenomena by conducting image differencing and relaying alerts to their communities. Machine learning tools have been used on data from these surveys and their precursors for than a decade, and convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which make predictions directly from input images, saw particularly broad adoption through the 2010s. Since then, continually rapid advances in computer vision have transformed the standard practices around using such models.