A study co-led by the University of Oxford, Google Cloud and Radboud University shows a general-purpose large language model, Google's Gemini, can identify real celestial changes and explain its reasoning using only 15 example image triplets and brief instructions, achieving about 93% accuracy across ATLAS, MeerLICHT and Pan-STARRS alerts.
The workflow ingests New, Reference and Difference by Sophie Jenkins
London, UK (SPX) Oct 09, 2025
A study co-led by the University of Oxford, Google Cloud and Radboud University shows a general-purpose large language model, Google's Gemini, can identify real celestial changes and explain its reasoning using only 15 example image triplets and brief instructions, achieving about 93% accuracy across ATLAS, MeerLICHT and Pan-STARRS alerts.
The workflow ingests New, Reference and Difference images per candidate and outputs a real/bogus decision, a concise text rationale and an interest score for follow-up triage, addressing the data deluge from surveys such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory expected to produce roughly 20 terabytes per day.
"It's striking that a handful of examples and clear text instructions can deliver such accuracy," said Dr Fiorenzo Stoppa. Co-lead author Turan Bulmus said the approach "demonstrates how general-purpose LLMs can democratise scientific discovery."
A panel of 12 astronomers rated the AI's explanations highly coherent; by using the model's self-assessed coherence to flag uncertain cases for human review and refining the few-shot set, performance on one dataset improved from ~93.4% to ~96.7%. Professor Stephen Smartt noted the LLM's accuracy with minimal task-specific training "was remarkable," adding that scaling could be "a total game changer."
The team envisions agentic assistants that integrate imaging and photometry, check confidence, request robotic follow-up and escalate only the most promising events. Published 8 October in Nature Astronomy, the method can be rapidly adapted to new instruments and domains because it relies on small example sets and plain-language prompts.
Research Report:Textual interpretation of transient image classifications from large language models
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