31 August 2026 to 4 September 2026
University of Malta
Europe/Malta timezone

Leveraging Transformer Architectures for Scalable Exoplanet Transit Inference

1 Sept 2026, 15:10
20m
Aula Prima (University of Malta)

Aula Prima

University of Malta

Valletta Campus, St Paul Street Valletta VLT 1216, Malta

Speaker

Vikash Singh

Description

Current exoplanet detection relies heavily on iterative sampling and box-searching, methods that face significant scaling challenges with the massive data volumes expected from next-generation surveys. This presentation introduces an exploratory concept: adapting Large Language Model (LLM) architectures to treat photometric light curves as "textual" sequences. By utilizing self-attention mechanisms, we propose a framework to identify planetary transits and regress orbital parameters (Rp/Rs, period) in a single forward pass. This approach aims to leverage the "global context" of transformers to better distinguish subtle planetary signals from stellar noise and instrumental systematics. While this work is in its conceptual infancy, we outline a roadmap for using these models as rapid inference engines to provide high-quality priors for traditional physical modeling, potentially accelerating the discovery of small planets in big-data archives.

Presentation materials