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    Surrogate models for type II supernovae: Probing low-energy explosions and interaction-free regimes

    Zhengyang Zhang1,2,*, Shuai Zha1, Nikhil Sarin3,4, Takashi J. Moriya5,6,7, Chengyuan Wu1, and Bo Wang1,†

    • *Contact author: zhangzhengyang@ynao.ac.cn
    • †Contact author: wangbo@ynao.ac.cn

    Phys. Rev. D 114, 023020 – Published 14 July, 2026

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/hsms-7v8x

    Abstract

    To address the computational bottleneck of analyzing type II supernova samples from surveys like Legacy Survey of Space and Time, we present two stella-based neural network surrogates: the interaction model for low-energy explosions with potential circumstellar material (CSM) interaction and the photospheric model for standard interaction-free SNe IIP. Each surrogate follows a two-stage design in which an autoencoder first compresses stella spectral energy distributions (SEDs) into a latent representation and a separate neural-network emulator then maps physical parameters to that latent space. Both models incorporate latent mixup regularization to improve latent-space continuity, while using different network backbones tailored to their respective regimes: ResNet blocks for the interaction model and 2D CNNs for the photospheric model. On test sets, the interaction model and photospheric model achieve normalized SED reconstruction MSEs of ≈9.1×10−5 and 1.0×10−4, respectively. For the low-luminosity SN 2005cs, the interaction model favors a low-mass progenitor (MZAMS=10.40−0.05+0.04M⊙) with evidence for confined dense CSM, highlighting the likely presence of CSM interaction and offering a physical scenario consistent with direct imaging that helps resolve the historical mass discrepancy. For SN 2012aw, serving as a validation benchmark, the interaction model demonstrates consistency with previous studies by recovering a progenitor mass (MZAMS=11.05−0.06+0.06M⊙). For the archetypal SN 1999em, the photospheric model derives a progenitor mass (MZAMS=10.05−0.04+0.07M⊙) broadly consistent with direct preexplosion imaging limits without explicit CSM modeling, demonstrating that the photospheric model captures the essential physics of standard type IIP explosions. This model-level implementation can reduce full Bayesian parameter-inference runtime from days to minutes, providing a practical foundation for near-real-time physical characterization in large survey streams.

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