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Instead, independent classifiers are trained for different tiers of classified data, and events are excluded if they fall outside of these well-defined but flat classification schemes. Here, we introduce a weighted hierarchical cross-entropy objective function for classification of astrophysical transients. Our method allows users to directly build and use physics- or observationally-motivated tree-based taxonomies. Our weighted hierarchical cross-entropy loss directly uses this graph to accurately classify all targets into any node of the tree, re-weighting imbalanced classes. We test our novel loss on a set of variable stars and extragalactic transients from the Zwicky Transient Facility, showing that we can achieve similar performance to fine-tuned classifiers with the advantage of notably more flexibility in downstream classification tasks.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.02266v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.02266v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"hierarchical-cross-entropy-loss-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/villrv/hxe-for-tda","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"hierarchical-cross-entropy-loss-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/uiucsn/elasticc-classification","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2312.02266","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2312.02266","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2312.02266"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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