Cross-Temporal Spectrogram Autoencoder (CTSAE): Unsupervised Dimensionality Reduction for Clustering Gravitational Wave Glitches

Yi Li, Yunan Wu, Aggelos K. Katsaggelos; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2024, pp. 6837-6846

The advancement of The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has significantly enhanced the feasibility and reliability of gravitational wave detection. However LIGO's high sensitivity makes it susceptible to transient noises known as glitches which necessitate effective differentiation from real gravitational wave signals. Traditional approaches predominantly employ fully supervised or semi-supervised algorithms for the task of glitch classification and clustering. In the future task of identifying and classifying glitches across main and auxiliary channels it is impractical to build a dataset with manually labeled ground-truth. In addition the patterns of glitches can vary with time generating new glitches without manual labels. In response to this challenge we introduce the Cross-Temporal Spectrogram Autoencoder (CTSAE) a pioneering unsupervised method for the dimensionality reduction and clustering of gravitational wave glitches. CTSAE integrates a novel four-branch autoencoder with a hybrid of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Vision Transformers (ViT). To further extract features across multi-branches we introduce a novel multi-branch fusion method using the CLS (Class) token. Our model trained and evaluated on the GravitySpy O3 dataset on the main channel demonstrates superior performance in clustering tasks when compared to state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning methods. To the best of our knowledge CTSAE represents the first unsupervised approach tailored specifically for clustering LIGO data marking a significant step forward in the field of gravitational wave research. The code of this paper is available at https://github.com/Zod-L/CTSAE