ASTROCO: Self-Supervised Conformer-Style Transformers for Light-Curve Embeddings

We present AstroCo, a Conformer-style encoder for irregular stellar light curves. By combining attention with depthwise convolutions and gating, AstroCo captures both global dependencies and local features. On MACHO R-band, AstroCo outperforms Astromer v1/v2, yielding 70%/61% lower error and a relative macro-F1 gain of ~7%, while producing embeddings that transfer effectively to few-shot classification. These results highlight AstroCo’s potential as a strong and label-efficient foundation for time-domain astronomy.