Discovering Strong Gravitational Lenses in the Dark Energy Survey with Interactive Machine Learning and Crowd-sourced Inspection with Space Warps

González, J.; Holloway, P.; Collett, T.; Verma, A.; Bechtol, K.; Marshall, P.; More, A.; Acevedo Barroso, J.; Cartwright, G.; Martinez, M.; Li, T.; Rojas, K.; Schuldt, S.; Birrer, S.; Diehl, H. T.; Morgan, R.; Drlica-Wagner, A.; O'Donnell, J. H.; Zaborowski, E.; Nord, B.; Baeten, E. M.; Johnson, L. C.; Macmillan, C.; Abbott, T. M. C.; Aguena, M.; Allam, S. S.; Brooks, D.; Buckley-Geer, E.; Burke, D. L.; Carnero Rosell, A.; Carretero, J.; Cawthon, R.; Davis, T. M.; De Vicente, J.; Desai, S.; Doel, P.; Everett, S.; Flaugher, B.; Frieman, J.; García-Bellido, J.; Gaztanaga, E.; Giannini, G.; Gruen, D.; Gruendl, R. A.; Gutierrez, G.; Hinton, S. R.; Hollowood, D. L.; Honscheid, K.; James, D. J.; Kuehn, K.; Lahav, O.; Lee, S.; Lima, M.; Marshall, J. L.; Mena-Fernández, J.; Miquel, R.; Myles, J.; Pereira, M. E. S.; Pieres, A.; Plazas Malagón, A. A.; Roodman, A.; Samuroff, S.; Sanchez, E.; Sanchez Cid, D.; Santiago, B.; Sevilla-Noarbe, I.; Smith, M.; Suchyta, E.; Tarle, G.; Tucker, D. L.; Vikram, V.; Walker, A. R.; Weaverdyck, N.; DES Collaboration
Referencia bibliográfica

The Astrophysical Journal

Fecha de publicación:
5
2026
Número de autores
74
Número de autores del IAC
1
Número de citas
14
Número de citas referidas
0
Descripción
We conduct a search for strong gravitational lenses in the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year 6 imaging data. We implement a pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) for our machine learning (ML) architecture and adopt interactive machine learning to construct a training sample with multiple classes to address common types of false positives. Our ML model reduces ∼236 million DES cutout images to 22,564 targets of interest, including ∼85% of previously reported galaxy─galaxy lens candidates discovered in DES. These targets were visually inspected by citizen scientists, who ruled out ∼90% as false positives. Of the remaining 2618 candidates, 149 were expert-classified as "definite" lenses and 516 as "probable" lenses, for a total of 665 systems, with 147 of these candidates being newly identified. Additionally, we trained a second ViT to find double-source plane lens systems, finding at least one double-source system. Our main ViT excels at identifying galaxy─galaxy lenses, consistently assigning high scores to candidates with high expert assessments. The top 800 ViT-scored images include ∼100 of our "definite" lens candidates. This selection is an order of magnitude higher in purity than previous convolutional neural-network-based lens searches and demonstrates the feasibility of applying our methodology for discovering large samples of lenses in future surveys.