Colloquium within National Seminar Theoretical High Energy Physics (DRSTP):
Friday 14 November, 11.15h, at Z011 Science Park Congress Centre
Speaker: Christoph Weniger (UvA)
Title: “Learning from Simulations: AI and the Future of Inference in Gravitational-Wave and Cosmological Data”
Abstract:
Modern gravitational-wave and cosmological analyses increasingly rely on simulations rather than analytic models. Traditional inference methods struggle with overlapping signals, non-Gaussian noise, and the enormous parameter spaces of Stage IV surveys and future observatories. Simulation-based inference (SBI) offers a new approach: by training neural networks on synthetic data, we can learn to perform Bayesian inference directly from simulations. I will illustrate this idea through examples from gravitational-wave parameter estimation — including stochastic backgrounds and extreme-mass-ratio inspirals — and from field-level cosmological inference. I will also discuss distributed, dynamically adaptive SBI frameworks that enable parallelized and online analysis at scale. The talk will conclude with a reflection on how these developments challenge our notions of transparency, interpretability, and trustworthiness — and how we can ensure that AI-driven inference remains a reliable and explainable tool for future experiments such as LISA.
This colloquium will be hybrid:
https://go.nikhef.nl/colloquium
More information about the National Seminar Theoretical High Energy Physics
