The Platonic Universe: Do Foundation Models See the Same Sky?
We test the Platonic Representation Hypothesis (PRH) in astronomy by measuring representational convergence across a range of foundation models trained on different data types. Using spectroscopic and imaging observations from JWST, HSC, Legacy Survey, and DESI, we compare representations from vision transformers, self-supervised models, and astronomy-specific architectures via mutual $k$-nearest neighbour analysis. We observe consistent scaling: representational alignment generally increases with model capacity across our tested architectures, supporting convergence toward a shared representation of galaxy astrophysics. Our results suggest that astronomical foundation models can use pre-trained general-purpose architectures, allowing us to capitalise on the broader machine learning community's already-spent computational investment.
Publication Details
- Journal
- ArXiv.org
- Published
- 2025-09-23
- Primary Topic
- Geochemistry and Geologic Mapping
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00