E(2) Equivariant Self-Attention for Radio Astronomy

Micah Bowles, Matthew Bromley, Max Allen, Anna M. M. Scaife

Abstract: In this work we introduce group-equivariant self-attention models to address the problem of explainable radio galaxy classification in astronomy. We evaluate various orders of both cyclic and dihedral equivariance, and show that including equivariance as a prior both reduces the number of epochs required to fit the data and results in improved performance. We highlight the benefits of equivariance when using self-attention as an explainable model and illustrate how equivariant models statistically attend the same features in their classifications as human astronomers.