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arXiv · 2609.04305

TNFlow: Amortized Posterior Inference for Trans-Neptunian Object Surface Composition

Agastya Gaur·Cristina M. Dalle Ore·Alessandra Ricca
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Abstract

We present TNFlow, a transformer and normalizing flow architecture for inferring the surface composition of Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) from their reflectance spectra. TNFlow is trained on synthetic spectra generated by the Shkuratov radiative transfer model to act as its inverse. TNFlow takes ${\sim}$0.7s to invert one spectrum on a single CPU core, returning a multimodal posterior over simplex-valid compositions and grain sizes. On synthetic spectra, the highest-weight mode achieves a mean total-variation distance of 0.149 from ground truth on the test split, and the model generalizes well to unseen combinations of known components. Qualitative tests on real JWST spectra show blindness or bias towards some materials. We suggest this could be attributed to either simulator fidelity or the training set.

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Agastya Gaur, Cristina M. Dalle Ore, Alessandra Ricca. 2026-09-03. TNFlow: Amortized Posterior Inference for Trans-Neptunian Object Surface Composition. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04305

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