Self-Supervised Spectral Representation Learning for LAMOST

The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) has collected tens of millions of spectra, providing an unprecedented resource for large-scale spectroscopic studies. Efficient retrieval techniques are therefore essential for exploring such massive datasets. Existing approaches often rely on predefined templates or manually labeled training samples, which can limit their applicability in large and diverse spectral archives. In this work, we present a general similarity-retrieval framework that combines self-supervised contrastive learning based on a convolutional neural network with Facebook AI Similarity Search (FAISS) for efficient large-scale spectral retrieval. The framework learns spectral representations directly from unlabeled data and enables flexible retrieval from user-defined wavelength regions based on feature similarity. We evaluate the framework on several stellar populations in LAMOST DR8. For late-type M8-star retrieval, 90.5% of the top 1000 retrieved spectra are later than M6. For M0–M5 giants, the mean retrieval accuracy across six subtypes reaches 94.8%. Using a C-H star spectrum as the query spectrum, 90.8% of the top 1000 retrieved candidates are classified as carbon stars by the LAMOST pipeline. Cross-matching with SIMBAD further confirms 255 C-H stars and 47 C-R stars among the retrieved candidates. These results demonstrate that the proposed framework can efficiently identify spectrally similar objects across large spectroscopic databases and can serve as a useful tool for searching for rare or spectrally distinctive stellar populations.