Identifying Gems from Roman RAPIDly
July 2026 • 2026PASP..138g4502G
Abstract • The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman), set for launch as early as 2026 September, will conduct wide-field infrared imaging surveys with unprecedented spatial resolution and cadence, enabling the discovery of millions of astronomical transients. Hence, it is necessary to have automated pipelines for generating alerts in place so that the telescope can begin discovering reliable transients and variable objects soon after it is launched. However, no real Roman data currently exist, making the development of such pipelines difficult. In this work, we present a machine learning model RuBR and a general methodology for distinguishing genuine transient and variable detections from spurious (bogus) detections within the RAPID pipeline. In particular, we present three models using this methodology: RuBRcomb trained and tested on combined locally injected and OpenUniverse2024 transients, RuBRloc trained on locally injected transients and tested on OpenUniverse2024 transients, and RuBRDA that combines locally injected transients with a fraction of OpenUniverse2024 transients in domain-adaptation mode for training. This paves the way for strategies to adapt the RuBRcomb model to real observations in the absence of any ground-truth labels during the early phases of the Roman mission. While the image differencing pipeline continues to be improved, our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and its promise for robust real-bogus classification in the Roman era.
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