Physics-inspired spatiotemporal-graph AI ensemble for the detection of higher order wave mode signals of spinning binary black hole mergers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel AI ensemble combining dilated convolutional and graph neural networks for detecting higher order gravitational wave modes from spinning binary black hole mergers, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Contribution

It presents a new spatiotemporal-graph AI model that effectively captures both temporal and spatial features for gravitational wave detection, trained on synthetic data and applied to real observation data.

Findings

Achieved state-of-the-art detection performance with minimal false positives.

Processed a decade of gravitational wave data in 3.5 hours using supercomputing resources.

Detected 6 gravitational waves in the O3b LIGO/Virgo data with high accuracy.

Abstract

We present a new class of AI models for the detection of quasi-circular, spinning, non-precessing binary black hole mergers whose waveforms include the higher order gravitational wave modes $(l, |m|)=\{(2, 2), (2, 1), (3, 3), (3, 2), (4, 4)\}$, and mode mixing effects in the $l = 3, |m| = 2$ harmonics. These AI models combine hybrid dilated convolution neural networks to accurately model both short- and long-range temporal sequential information of gravitational waves; and graph neural networks to capture spatial correlations among gravitational wave observatories to consistently describe and identify the presence of a signal in a three detector network encompassing the Advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors. We first trained these spatiotemporal-graph AI models using synthetic noise, using 1.2 million modeled waveforms to densely sample this signal manifold, within 1.7 hours using 256 A100 GPUs in the Polaris supercomputer at the ALCF. Our distributed training approach had optimal performance, and strong scaling up to 512 A100 GPUs. With these AI ensembles we processed data from a three detector network, and found that an ensemble of 4 AI models achieves state-of-the-art performance for signal detection, and reports two misclassifications for every decade of searched data. We distributed AI inference over 128 GPUs in the Polaris supercomputer and 128 nodes in the Theta supercomputer, and completed the processing of a decade of gravitational wave data from a three detector network within 3.5 hours. Finally, we fine-tuned these AI ensembles to process the entire month of February 2020, which is part of the O3b LIGO/Virgo observation run, and found 6 gravitational waves, concurrently identified in Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo data, and zero false positives. This analysis was completed in one hour using one A100 GPU.