From Galaxy Zoo DECaLS to BASS/MzLS: detailed galaxy morphology classification with unsupervised domain adaption

Ye, Renhao, Shen, Shiyin, de Souza, Rafael S., Xu, Quanfeng, Chen, Mi, Chen, Zhu, Ishida, Emille E. O., Krone-Martins, Alberto and Durgesh, Rupesh (2025) From Galaxy Zoo DECaLS to BASS/MzLS: detailed galaxy morphology classification with unsupervised domain adaption. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), 537 (2): staf025. 640–649. ISSN 0035-8711
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The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument Legacy Imaging Surveys (DESI-LIS) comprise three distinct surveys: the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS), the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey (BASS), and the Mayall z-band Legacy Survey (MzLS). The citizen science project Galaxy Zoo DECaLS 5 (GZD-5) has provided extensive and detailed morphology labels for a sample of 253 287 galaxies within the DECaLS survey. This data set has been foundational for numerous deep learning-based galaxy morphology classification studies. However, due to differences in signal-to-noise ratios and resolutions between the DECaLS images and those from BASS and MzLS (collectively referred to as BMz), a neural network trained on DECaLS images cannot be directly applied to BMz images due to distributional mismatch. In this study, we explore an unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) method that fine-tunes a source domain model trained on DECaLS images with GZD-5 labels to BMz images, aiming to reduce bias in galaxy morphology classification within the BMz survey. Our source domain model, used as a starting point for UDA, achieves performance on the DECaLS galaxies' validation set comparable to the results of related works. For BMz galaxies, the fine-tuned target domain model significantly improves performance compared to the direct application of the source domain model, reaching a level comparable to that of the source domain. We also release a catalogue of detailed morphology classifications for 248 088 galaxies within the BMz survey, accompanied by usage recommendations.

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