Domain Adaptation for Simulation-Based Dark Matter Searches with Strong Gravitational Lensing

The application of machine learning for quantifying dark matter substructure is growing in popularity. However, due to the differences with the real instrumental data, machine learning models trained on simulations are expected to lose accuracy when applied to real data. Here, domain adaptation can serve as a crucial bridge between simulations and real data applications. In this work, we demonstrate the power of domain adaptation techniques applied to strong gravitational lensing data with dark matter substructure. We show with simulated data sets representative of Euclid and Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations that domain adaptation can significantly mitigate the losses in the model performance when applied to new domains.