Debiasing with Diffusion: Probabilistic Reconstruction of Dark Matter Fields from Galaxies with CAMELS

Abstract

Galaxies are biased tracers of the underlying cosmic web, which is dominated by dark matter (DM) components that cannot be directly observed. Galaxy formation simulations can be used to study the relationship between DM density fields and galaxy distributions. However, this relationship can be sensitive to assumptions in cosmology and astrophysical processes embedded in galaxy formation models, which remain uncertain in many aspects. In this work, we develop a diffusion generative model to reconstruct DM fields from galaxies. The diffusion model is trained on the CAMELS simulation suite that contains thousands of state-of-the-art galaxy formation simulations with varying cosmological parameters and subgrid astrophysics. We demonstrate that the diffusion model can predict the unbiased posterior distribution of the underlying DM fields from the given stellar density fields while being able to marginalize over uncertainties in cosmological and astrophysical models. Interestingly, the model generalizes to simulation volumes ≈500 times larger than those it was trained on and across different galaxy formation models. The code for reproducing these results can be found at https://github.com/victoriaono/variational-diffusion-cdm ✎ .