A Missing Latent, Not a Missing Simulator: Radius-Augmented Inference for Real JWST Retrieval
Amortized simulation-based inference (SBI), which is trained on radiative-transfer simulators, recovers exoplanet atmospheres accurately on synthetic James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spectra but collapses when it comes to real reduced spectra. The flow posterior collapsed on real WASP-39b (importance-sampling effective sample size (ESS) = 1, best-fit \c{hi}2/N = 301), and such a failure is usually blamed on missing the forward-model physics, but ruling these levers out with nested sampling first (a temperature gradient, SO2 opacity, and a high-fidelity opacity set) leaves the fit unchanged, meaning the collapse is not from the simulator misspecification but instead from a missing latent,...
| Authors | Angshuman Chakravertty, P V V Raj |
|---|---|
| Primary category | astro-ph.IM |
| Published | 30 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 September 2026 |
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