Surrogate models for type II supernovae: Probing low-energy explosions and interaction-free regimes
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 and , respectively. For the low-luminosity SN 2005cs, the interaction model favors a low-mass progenitor () 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 (). For the archetypal SN 1999em, the photospheric model derives a progenitor mass () 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.