ML Anthology

AION-1: Omnimodal Foundation Model for Astronomical Sciences

Liam Holden Parker, Francois Lanusse, Jeff Shen, Ollie Liu, Tom Hehir, Leopoldo Sarra, Lucas Thibaut Meyer, Micah Bowles, Sebastian Wagner-Carena, Helen Qu, Siavash Golkar, Alberto Bietti, Hatim Bourfoune, Pierre Cornette, Keiya Hirashima, Geraud Krawezik, Ruben Ohana, Nicholas Lourie, Michael McCabe, Rudy Morel, Payel Mukhopadhyay, Mariel Pettee, Kyunghyun Cho, Miles Cranmer, Shirley Ho
NeurIPS 2025
/neurips/2025/parker2025neurips-aion1/

Abstract

While foundation models have shown promise across a variety of fields, astronomy lacks a unified framework for joint modeling across its highly diverse data modalities. In this paper, we present AION-1, the first large-scale multimodal foundation family of models for astronomy. AION-1 enables arbitrary transformations between heterogeneous data types using a two-stage architecture: modality-specific tokenization followed by transformer-based masked modeling of cross-modal token sequences. Trained on over 200M astronomical objects, AION-1 demonstrates strong performance across regression, classification, generation, and object retrieval tasks. Beyond astronomy, AION-1 provides a scalable blueprint for multimodal scientific foundation models that can seamlessly integrate heterogeneous combinations of real-world observations. Our model release is entirely open source, including the dataset, training script, and weights.

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Cite

Text

Parker et al. "AION-1: Omnimodal Foundation Model for Astronomical Sciences." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025.

Markdown

[Parker et al. "AION-1: Omnimodal Foundation Model for Astronomical Sciences." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025.](https://mlanthology.org/neurips/2025/parker2025neurips-aion1/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{parker2025neurips-aion1,
  title     = {{AION-1: Omnimodal Foundation Model for Astronomical Sciences}},
  author    = {Parker, Liam Holden and Lanusse, Francois and Shen, Jeff and Liu, Ollie and Hehir, Tom and Sarra, Leopoldo and Meyer, Lucas Thibaut and Bowles, Micah and Wagner-Carena, Sebastian and Qu, Helen and Golkar, Siavash and Bietti, Alberto and Bourfoune, Hatim and Cornette, Pierre and Hirashima, Keiya and Krawezik, Geraud and Ohana, Ruben and Lourie, Nicholas and McCabe, Michael and Morel, Rudy and Mukhopadhyay, Payel and Pettee, Mariel and Cho, Kyunghyun and Cranmer, Miles and Ho, Shirley},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  year      = {2025},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/neurips/2025/parker2025neurips-aion1/}
}