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With the development of deep learning, numerous methods for low-light image enhancement (LLIE) have demonstrated remarkable performance. Mainstream LLIE methods typically learn an end-to-end mapping based on pairs of low-light and normal-light images. However, normal-light images under varying illumination conditions serve as reference images, making it difficult to define a ``perfect'' reference image This leads to the challenge of reconciling metric-oriented and visual-friendly results. Recently, many cross-modal studies have found that side information from other related modalities can guide visual representation learning. Based on this, we introduce a Natural Language Supervision (NLS) strategy, which learns feature maps from text corresponding to images, offering a general and flexible interface for describing an image under different illumination. However, image distributions conditioned on textual descriptions are highly multimodal, which makes training difficult. To address this issue, we design a Textual Guidance Conditioning Mechanism (TCM) that incorporates the connections between image regions and sentence words, enhancing the ability to capture fine-grained cross-modal cues for images and text. This strategy not only utilizes a wider range of supervised sources, but also provides a new paradigm for LLIE based on visual and textual feature alignment. In order to effectively identify and merge features from various levels of image and textual information, we design an Information Fusion Attention (IFA) module to enhance different regions at different levels. We integrate the proposed TCM and IFA into a Natural Language Supervision network for LLIE, named NaLSuper. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate the robustness and superior effectiveness of our proposed NaLSuper., Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures

The origin of jet launching mainly comes from two mechanisms: the BZ mechanism and the BP mechanism. However, it is in debate which one is dominating in blazars. In this work, we used a sample of 937 Fermi blazars to study the jet formation mechanism. We studied the correlation between the jet power and the accretion rate, as well as the comparison between jet power estimated by spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting and that estimated by theoretical formula and radio flux density. Our results suggest that there is no correlation between jet power estimated by SED fitting and the accretion rate for BL Lacs, while a positive and weak correlation exists for flat spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs). Meanwhile, to confirm whether the BP and BZ mechanism is sufficient to launch the jet for FSRQs and BL Lacs, we compare the theoretical jet power with that estimated by SED fitting, as well as that by radio emission. We found that the jet power for most of the two subclasses estimated by SED fitting cannot be explained by either the BP or BZ mechanism. While the jet power for most FSRQs estimated by radio flux density can be explained by the BP mechanism, and most BL Lacs can be explained by the BZ mechanism. We also found that FSRQs have higher accretion rates than BL Lacs, implying different accretion disks around their central black holes: FSRQs typically have standard disks, while BL Lacs usually have advection-dominated accretion flow disks., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures

This study focuses on transforming galaxy images between astronomical surveys, specifically enhancing images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS) to achieve quality comparable to the Hyper Suprime-Cam survey (HSC). We proposed a hybrid model called Pix2WGAN, which integrates the pix2pix framework with the Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network with Gradient Penalty (WGAN-GP) to convert low-quality observational images into high-quality counterparts. Our model successfully transformed DECaLS images into pseudo-HSC images, yielding impressive results and significantly enhancing the identification of complex structures, such as galaxy spiral arms and tidal tails, which may have been overlooked in the original DECaLS images. Moreover, Pix2WGAN effectively addresses issues like artifacts, noise, and blurriness in both source and target images. In addition to the basic Pix2WGAN model, we further developed an advanced architecture called Cascaded Pix2WGAN, which incorporates a multi-stage training mechanism designed to bridge the quality gap between SDSS and HSC images, demonstrating similarly promising outcomes. We systematically assessed the similarity between the model-generated pseudo-HSC images and actual HSC images using various metrics, including Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), along with perceptual metrics such as Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) and Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID). The results indicate that images transformed by our model outperform both the original SDSS and DECaLS images across nearly all evaluation metrics. Our research is expected to provide significant technical support for astronomical data analysis, cross-survey image integration, and high-precision astrometry.

Accurate estimation of photometric redshifts (photo-$z$s) is crucial for cosmological surveys. Various methods have been developed for this purpose, such as template fitting methods and machine learning techniques, each with its own applications, advantages, and limitations. In this study, we propose a new approach that utilizes a deep learning model based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to predict photo-$z$. Unlike many existing machine learning models, our method requires only flux measurements from different observed filters as input. The model can automatically learn the complex relationships between the flux data across different wavelengths, eliminating the need for manually extracted or derived input features, thereby providing precise photo-$z$ estimates. The effectiveness of our proposed model is evaluated using simulated data from the Chinese Space Station Telescope (CSST) sourced from the Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys (HST-ACS) and the COSMOS catalog, considering anticipated instrument effects of the future CSST. Results from experiments demonstrate that our LSTM model, compared to commonly used template fitting and machine learning approaches, requires minimal input parameters and achieves high precision in photo-$z$ estimation. For instance, when trained on the same dataset and provided only with photometric fluxes as input features, the proposed LSTM model yields one-third of the outliers $f_{out}$ observed with a Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Network (MLP) model, while the normalized median absolute deviation $\rm \sigma_{NMAD}$ is only two-thirds that of the MLP model. This study presents a novel approach to accurately estimate photo-$z$s of galaxies using photometric data from large-scale survey projects.

We present a comprehensive study of Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies (ULIRGs), leveraging data from the IRAS Faint Source Catalogue (FSC) and the spectroscopic catalog in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) DR16. Our meticulous cross-matching technique significantly enhances the reliability of ULIRG identification, resulting in the identification of 283 reliable ULIRGs, including 102 new detections, while discarding 120 previously reported false sources. Covering a redshift range of $z = 0.018 - 0.996$, with a median redshift of $\bar{z} = 0.259$, our uniform sample reveals apparent interaction features in approximately 40\% of ULIRGs, increasing to 92\% for those with $z < 0.1$. Through optical spectra analysis, it is indicated that over 58\% of ULIRGs host an AGN, which is twice as high as the detections based solely on infrared colors. Moreover, a pronounced excess of radio emissions associated with AGN activity results in a steeper radio-far-infrared correlation. Notably, Type I ULIRGs exhibit properties similar to those of narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies (NLS1s), with an elevated incidence rate of \ion{Mg}{2} BALs (16.7\%), surpassing that of typical optically selected quasars by over tenfold, consistent with current evolutionary models. We anticipate that forthcoming telescopes such as the China Space Station Telescope (CSST) and Leighton Chajnantor Telescope (LCT) will provide deeper insights into ULIRG morphology, dust distribution, molecular gas, and AGN activity., Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJS, 33 pages, 13 figures, and 1 table

Accurate photometric redshift (photo-$z$) estimation requires support from multi-band observational data. However, in the actual process of astronomical observations and data processing, some sources may have missing observational data in certain bands for various reasons. This could greatly affect the accuracy and reliability of photo-$z$ estimation for these sources, and even render some estimation methods unusable. The same situation may exist for the upcoming Chinese Space Station Telescope (CSST). In this study, we employ a deep learning method called Generative Adversarial Imputation Networks (GAIN) to impute the missing photometric data in CSST, aiming to reduce the impact of data missing on photo-$z$ estimation and improve estimation accuracy. Our results demonstrate that using the GAIN technique can effectively fill in the missing photometric data in CSST. Particularly, when the data missing rate is below 30\%, the imputation of photometric data exhibits high accuracy, with higher accuracy in the $g$, $r$, $i$, $z$, and $y$ bands compared to the $NUV$ and $u$ bands. After filling in the missing values, the quality of photo-$z$ estimation obtained by the widely used Easy and Accurate Zphot from Yale (EAZY) software is notably enhanced. Evaluation metrics for assessing the quality of photo-$z$ estimation, including the catastrophic outlier fraction ($f_{out}$), the normalized median absolute deviation ($\rm {\sigma_{NMAD}}$), and the bias of photometric redshift ($bias$), all show some degree of improvement. Our research will help maximize the utilization of observational data and provide a new method for handling sample missing values for applications that require complete photometry data to produce results.

In the forthcoming era of big astronomical data, it is a burden to find out target sources from ground-based and space-based telescopes. Although Machine Learning (ML) methods have been extensively utilized to address this issue, the incorporation of in-depth data analysis can significantly enhance the efficiency of identifying target sources when dealing with massive volumes of astronomical data. In this work, we focused on the task of finding AGN candidates and identifying BL Lac/FSRQ candidates from the 4FGL DR3 uncertain sources. We studied the correlations among the attributes of the 4FGL DR3 catalogue and proposed a novel method, named FDIDWT, to transform the original data. The transformed dataset is characterized as low-dimensional and feature-highlighted, with the estimation of correlation features by Fractal Dimension (FD) theory and the multi-resolution analysis by Inverse Discrete Wavelet Transform (IDWT). Combining the FDIDWT method with an improved lightweight MatchboxConv1D model, we accomplished two missions: (1) to distinguish the Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) from others (Non-AGNs) in the 4FGL DR3 uncertain sources with an accuracy of 96.65%, namely, Mission A; (2) to classify blazar candidates of uncertain type (BCUs) into BL Lacertae objects (BL Lacs) or Flat Spectrum Radio Quasars (FSRQs) with an accuracy of 92.03%, namely, Mission B. There are 1354 AGN candidates in Mission A, 482 BL Lacs candidates and 128 FSRQ candidates in Mission B were found. The results show a high consistency of greater than 98% with the results in previous works. In addition, our method has the advantage of finding less variable and relatively faint sources than ordinary methods.

Accurate estimation of photometric redshifts (photo-$z$) is crucial in studies of both galaxy evolution and cosmology using current and future large sky surveys. In this study, we employ Random Forest (RF), a machine learning algorithm, to estimate photo-$z$ and investigate the systematic uncertainties affecting the results. Using galaxy flux and color as input features, we construct a mapping between input features and redshift by using a training set of simulated data, generated from the Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys (HST-ACS) and COSMOS catalogue, with the expected instrumental effects of the planned China Space Station Telescope (CSST). To improve the accuracy and confidence of predictions, we incorporate inverse variance weighting and perturb the catalog using input feature errors. Our results show that weighted RF can achieve a photo-$z$ accuracy of $\rm \sigma_{NMAD}=0.025$ and an outlier fraction of $\rm \eta=2.045\%$, significantly better than the values of $\rm \sigma_{NMAD}=0.043$ and $\rm \eta=6.45\%$ obtained by the widely used Easy and Accurate Zphot from Yale (EAZY) software which uses template-fitting method. Furthermore, we have calculated the importance of each input feature for different redshift ranges and found that the most important input features reflect the approximate position of the break features in galaxy spectra, demonstrating the algorithm's ability to extract physical information from data. Additionally, we have established confidence indices and error bars for each prediction value based on the shape of the redshift probability distribution function, suggesting that screening sources with high confidence can further reduce the outlier fraction.

Image captured under low-light conditions presents unpleasing artifacts, which debilitate the performance of feature extraction for many upstream visual tasks. Low-light image enhancement aims at improving brightness and contrast, and further reducing noise that corrupts the visual quality. Recently, many image restoration methods based on Swin Transformer have been proposed and achieve impressive performance. However, on one hand, trivially employing Swin Transformer for low-light image enhancement would expose some artifacts, including over-exposure, brightness imbalance and noise corruption, etc. On the other hand, it is impractical to capture image pairs of low-light images and corresponding ground-truth, i.e. well-exposed image in same visual scene. In this paper, we propose a dual-branch network based on Swin Transformer, guided by a signal-to-noise ratio prior map which provides the spatial-varying information for low-light image enhancement. Moreover, we leverage unsupervised learning to construct the optimization objective based on Retinex model, to guide the training of proposed network. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model is competitive with the baseline models., Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures

At the age of big data, recommender systems have shown remarkable success as a key means of information filtering in our daily life. Recent years have witnessed the technical development of recommender systems, from perception learning to cognition reasoning which intuitively build the task of recommendation as the procedure of logical reasoning and have achieve significant improvement. However, the logical statement in reasoning implicitly admits irrelevance of ordering, even does not consider time information which plays an important role in many recommendation tasks. Furthermore, recommendation model incorporated with temporal context would tend to be self-attentive, i.e., automatically focus more (less) on the relevance (irrelevance), respectively. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a Time-aware Self-Attention with Neural Collaborative Reasoning (TiSANCR) based recommendation model, which integrates temporal patterns and self-attention mechanism into reasoning-based recommendation. Specially, temporal patterns represented by relative time, provide context and auxiliary information to characterize the user's preference in recommendation, while self-attention is leveraged to distill informative patterns and suppress irrelevances. Therefore, the fusion of self-attentive temporal information provides deeper representation of user's preference. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed TiSANCR achieves significant improvement and consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art recommendation methods., Comment: 13 pages, 13 figures

Galaxy photometric redshift (photo-$z$) is crucial in cosmological studies, such as weak gravitational lensing and galaxy angular clustering measurements. In this work, we try to extract photo-$z$ information and construct its probability distribution function (PDF) using the Bayesian neural networks (BNN) from both galaxy flux and image data expected to be obtained by the China Space Station Telescope (CSST). The mock galaxy images are generated from the Advanced Camera for Surveys of Hubble Space Telescope ($HST$-ACS) and COSMOS catalog, in which the CSST instrumental effects are carefully considered. And the galaxy flux data are measured from galaxy images using aperture photometry. We construct Bayesian multilayer perceptron (B-MLP) and Bayesian convolutional neural network (B-CNN) to predict photo-$z$ along with the PDFs from fluxes and images, respectively. We combine the B-MLP and B-CNN together, and construct a hybrid network and employ the transfer learning techniques to investigate the improvement of including both flux and image data. For galaxy samples with SNR$>$10 in $g$ or $i$ band, we find the accuracy and outlier fraction of photo-$z$ can achieve $\sigma_{\rm NMAD}=0.022$ and $\eta=2.35\%$ for the B-MLP using flux data only, and $\sigma_{\rm NMAD}=0.022$ and $\eta=1.32\%$ for the B-CNN using image data only. The Bayesian hybrid network can achieve $\sigma_{\rm NMAD}=0.021$ and $\eta=1.23\%$, and utilizing transfer learning technique can improve results to $\sigma_{\rm NMAD}=0.019$ and $\eta=1.17\%$, which can provide the most confident predictions with the lowest average uncertainty., Comment: 22 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in RAA

To investigate the properties of dust in the nuclear region of quasars, we explored the extinction curves of the iron low-ionization broad absorption line (FeLoBAL) quasar SDSS J163004.29+311957.6 and its two analogues. The parameterized extinction curves indicated the Milky Way-like 2175 \AA~ bump features in underlying extinction, which are similar to those seen in the Local Group and a subset of high-redshift star-forming galaxies. Compared to the bump features in the Large Magellanic Clouds (LMC), the detections in this work are much closer to those in the Milky Way (MW). These bump features, as well as those in the high- and low-ionization broad absorption line (BAL) quasars of Zhang et al., are probably the counterpart of the 2175 \AA~ bump features in the quasar environment. This type of dust grain is generally small, easily disrupted by high-energy photons and has difficulty surviving in the radiation field of the active galactic nucleus (AGN). However, due to the presence of absorption-line outflows, the 2175 \AA~ bump feature in quasars, which should be rare, is seen many times in BAL quasars. The shielding effect of outflow clouds allows the MW-like dust grains to be assembled or extends the survival period in the quasar nuclear region. The process, and physical and chemical conditions deserve further observational study and investigation., Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures. Accepted by Astronomy & Astrophysics

The accuracy of galaxy photometric redshift (photo-$z$) can significantly affect the analysis of weak gravitational lensing measurements, especially for future high-precision surveys. In this work, we try to extract photo-$z$ information from both galaxy flux and image data expected to be obtained by China Space Station Telescope (CSST) using neural networks. We generate mock galaxy images based on the observational images from the Advanced Camera for Surveys of Hubble Space Telescope (HST-ACS) and COSMOS catalogs, considering the CSST instrumental effects. Galaxy flux data are then measured directly from these images by aperture photometry. The Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) are constructed to predict photo-$z$ from fluxes and images, respectively. We also propose to use an efficient hybrid network, which combines MLP and CNN, by employing transfer learning techniques to investigate the improvement of the result with both flux and image data included. We find that the photo-$z$ accuracy and outlier fraction can achieve $\sigma_{\rm NMAD} = 0.023$ and $\eta = 1.43\%$ for the MLP using flux data only, and $\sigma_{\rm NMAD} = 0.025$ and $\eta = 1.21\%$ for the CNN using image data only. The result can be further improved in high efficiency as $\sigma_{\rm NMAD} = 0.020$ and $\eta = 0.90\%$ for the hybrid transfer network. These approaches result in similar galaxy median and mean redshifts ~0.8 and 0.9, respectively, for the redshift range from 0 to 4. This indicates that our networks can effectively and properly extract photo-$z$ information from the CSST galaxy flux and image data., Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS

Existing models of galaxy formation have not yet explained striking correlations between structure and star-formation activity in galaxies, notably the sloped and moving boundaries that divide star-forming from quenched galaxies in key structural diagrams. This paper uses these and other relations to ``reverse-engineer'' the quenching process for central galaxies. The basic idea is that star-forming galaxies with larger radii (at a given stellar mass) have lower black-hole masses due to lower central densities. Galaxies cross into the green valley when the cumulative effective energy radiated by their black hole equals $\sim4\times$ their halo-gas binding energy. Since larger-radii galaxies have smaller black holes, one finds they must evolve to higher stellar masses in order to meet this halo-energy criterion, which explains the sloping boundaries. A possible cause of radii differences among star-forming galaxies is halo concentration. The evolutionary tracks of star-forming galaxies are nearly parallel to the green-valley boundaries, and it is mainly the sideways motions of these boundaries with cosmic time that cause galaxies to quench. BH-scaling laws for star-forming, quenched, and green-valley galaxies are different, and most BH mass growth takes place in the green valley. Implications include: the radii of star-forming galaxies are an important second parameter in shaping their black holes; black holes are connected to their halos but in different ways for star-forming, quenched, and green-valley galaxies; and the same BH-halo quenching mechanism has been in place since $z \sim 3$. We conclude with a discussion of black hole-galaxy co-evolution, the origin and interpretation of BH scaling laws., Comment: 45 pages, 20 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in ApJ

In blind image deconvolution, priors are often leveraged to constrain the solution space, so as to alleviate the under-determinacy. Priors which are trained separately from the task of deconvolution tend to be instable, or ineffective. We propose the Golf Optimizer, a novel but simple form of network that learns deep priors from data with better propagation behavior. Like playing golf, our method first estimates an aggressive propagation towards optimum using one network, and recurrently applies a residual CNN to learn the gradient of prior for delicate correction on restoration. Experiments show that our network achieves competitive performance on GoPro dataset, and our model is extremely lightweight compared with the state-of-art works., Comment: 12 pages, 16 figures

A small fraction($<10\%$) of SDSS main sample galaxies(MGs) have not been targeted with spectroscopy due to the the fiber collision effect. These galaxies have been compiled into the input catalog of the LAMOST extra-galactic survey and named as the complementary galaxy sample. In this paper, we introduce the project and the status of the spectroscopies of the complementary galaxies in the first two years of the LAMOST spectral survey(till Sep. of 2014). Moreover, we present a sample of 1,102 galaxy pairs identified from the LAMOST complementary galaxies and SDSS MGs, which are defined as that the two members have a projected distance smaller than 100 kpc and the recessional velocity difference smaller than 500 $\rm kms^{-1}$. Compared with the SDSS only selected galaxy pairs, the LAMOST-SDSS pairs take the advantages of not being biased toward large separations and therefor play as a useful supplement to the statistical studies of galaxy interaction and galaxy merging., Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, RAA accepted. The on-line pair catalog is temporarily available at http://cluster.shao.ac.cn/~shen/LEGAS/LSpair/LSpair_pub.cat