The Importance of Being Adaptable: An Exploration of the Power and Limitations of Domain Adaptation for Simulation-Based Inference with Galaxy Clusters
The application of deep machine learning methods in astronomy has exploded in the last decade, with new models showing remarkably improved performance on benchmark tasks. Not nearly enough attention is given to understanding the models' robustness, especially when the test data are systematically different from the training data, or "out of domain." Domain shift poses a significant challenge for simulation-based inference, where models are trained on simulated data but applied to real observational data. In this paper, we explore domain shift and test domain adaptation methods for a specific scientific case: simulation-based inference for estimating galaxy cluster masses from X-ray profiles. We build datasets to mimic simulation-based inference: a training set from the Magneticum simulation, a scatter-augmented training set to capture uncertainties in scaling relations, and a test set derived from the IllustrisTNG simulation. We demonstrate that the Test Set is out of domain in subtle ways that would be difficult to detect without careful analysis. We apply three deep learning methods: a standard neural network (NN), a neural network trained on the scatter-augmented input catalogs, and a Deep Reconstruction-Regression Network (DRRN), a semi-supervised deep model engineered to address domain shift. Although the NN improves results by 17% in the Training Data, it performs 40% worse on the out-of-domain Test Set. Surprisingly, the Scatter-Augmented Neural Network (SANN) performs similarly. While the DRRN is successful in mapping the training and Test Data onto the same latent space, it consistently underperforms compared to a straightforward Yx scaling relation. These results serve as a warning that simulation-based inference must be handled with extreme care, as subtle differences between training simulations and observational data can lead to unforeseen biases creeping into the results.