CosmoBench: A Multiscale, Multiview, Multitask Cosmology Benchmark for Geometric Deep Learning

Cosmological simulations provide a wealth of data in the form of point clouds and directed trees. A crucial goal is to extract insights from this data that shed light on the nature and composition of the Universe. In this paper we introduce CosmoBench, a benchmark dataset curated from state-of-the-art cosmological simulations whose runs required more than 41 million core-hours and generated over two petabytes of data. CosmoBench is the largest dataset of its kind: it contains 34 thousand point clouds from simulations of dark matter halos and galaxies at three different length scales, as well as 25 thousand directed trees that record the formation history of halos on two different time scales. The data in CosmoBench can be used for multiple tasks---to predict cosmological parameters from point clouds and merger trees, to predict the velocities of individual halos and galaxies from their collective positions, and to reconstruct merger trees on finer time scales from those on coarser time scales. We provide multiple baselines on these tasks, some based on established approaches from cosmological modeling and others rooted in machine learning. For the latter, we study different approaches---from simple linear models that are minimally constrained by symmetries to much larger and more computationally-demanding models in deep learning, such as graph neural networks. We find that least-squares fits with a handful of invariant features sometimes outperform deep architectures with many more parameters and far longer training times. Still there remains tremendous potential to improve these baselines by combining machine learning and cosmological modeling in a more principled way, one that fully exploits the structure in the data. CosmoBench sets the stage for bridging cosmology and geometric deep learning at scale. We invite the community to push the frontier of scientific discovery by engaging with this challenging, high-impact dataset. The data and code are available at this URL.