Spectuner-D1: Spectral Line Fitting of Interstellar Molecules Using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Open Access
- 9 February 2026
- journal article
- Published by American Astronomical Society in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series
- Vol. 283 (1)
Abstract
Spectral lines from interstellar molecules provide crucial insights into the physical and chemical conditions of the interstellar medium. Traditional spectral line analysis relies heavily on manual intervention, which becomes impractical when handling the massive datasets produced by modern facilities such as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). To address this challenge, we introduce a novel deep reinforcement learning framework to automate spectral line fitting. Using observational data from ALMA, we train a neural network that maps both molecular spectroscopic data and observed spectra to physical parameters such as excitation temperature and column density. The neural network predictions can serve as initial estimates and be further refined using a local optimizer. Our method achieves fitting results consistent with global optimization with multiple runs, while reducing the number of forward modeling runs by an order of magnitude. We apply our method to pixel-level fitting for an observation of the G327.3-0.6 hot core and validate our results using xclass . We perform the fitting for typical complex organic molecules of hot cores, including CH 3 OH, CH 3 OCHO, CH 3 OCH 3 , C 2 H 5 CN, and C 2 H 3 CN. For a region of 100 × 100 pixels covering 5 GHz bandwidth, the fitting process requires 4.9–41.9 minutes using a desktop with 16 cores and one consumer-grade GPU card.Keywords
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