Multiscale feature integration network for inpainting of full-sky CMB modes
Phys. Rev. D 113, 123501 – Published 1 June, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/gkcy-d2fv
Abstract
Foreground masking and incomplete sky coverage complicate cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization analyses by inducing mode coupling and imperfect E/B separation, with particularly strong impact on searches for primordial modes. We present SkyReconNet-P, a convolutional neural network for inpainting CMB polarization maps that extends the SkyReconNet framework to jointly reconstruct the polarization maps from partial-sky observations. The method combines regional processing with a hybrid design, utilizing standard convolution and dilated convolution to do a multiscale feature integration. We evaluate performance at both the map and power spectrum level using two masking scenarios: a generated random mask and the Planck 2018 common polarization inpainting mask. For both masking scenarios, SkyReconNet-P reproduces the large-scale morphology of the target maps. In power-spectrum space, we find that the reconstructed mode spectrum closely tracks the target at low multipoles, while small biases emerge at higher . For mode, the raw reconstructed spectra exhibit a larger multipole-dependent bias, which we mitigate using a simulation-based linear calibration. We show that the calibrated -mode spectrum preserves more information by comparing it with spectrum estimation using pseudo-. Finally, we demonstrate cosmological parameter inference from calibrated reconstructed spectra by fitting with a Gaussian bandpower likelihood, recovering posteriors consistent with injected parameters across three test ensembles down to . These results support inpainting as a complementary route to cut-sky approaches when downstream pipelines can greatly benefit from statistically well-characterized, gap-filled polarization maps.